|
Home
Search
Subscribe Online
Archives
About
Us
Cartoons
Online
Book Store
E-Greetings
Jobs @ MG
Advertise
on MG
Our
Team
Contact Us
Muslim
Matrimonials
Our Advertisers
| |
A year of war crimes and resistance
By Shawqi Al-Eissa
Colonial occupation is now universally
viewed as a crime against humanity. Many atrocities -- diverse in nature,
but all equally appalling -- have been perpetrated against occupied
peoples, especially in countries of the southern hemisphere. These
countries are still reeling from the impact of colonial rule, which
plundered or destroyed resources, aggravated ignorance, underdevelopment
and poverty, and then installed puppet dictatorships to serve
colonialism's political and economic aims after its military presence had
been withdrawn.
The Israeli occupation of Palestine is different in some respects from
other forms of colonial occupation. Israel is a state that was created to
replace the British protectorate in Palestine and its people were imported
to supplant the indigenous Palestinian populace, who were driven from
their land through intimidation, massacres and other acts of violence.
Unlike the British protectorate, Israel is not, nor was it ever intended
to be, a temporary military occupation whose officials and settlers were
destined to return to their native countries once it ended. Rather, it was
a European and then an American scheme to perpetuate and tighten control
over the Middle East and, simultaneously, to eliminate the Jewish problem.
Israel was created at the expense of the Palestinians' fundamental right
to self-determination in an independent state. This alone was a
humanitarian crime against the Palestinian people, perpetrated by Western
powers. Through their control of the UN and with the collaboration of the
ruling regimes in the Middle East that depended upon them, they impeded
the creation of a secular state for Arabs and Jews in Palestine,
partitioned Palestine to allow for Zionist occupation and statehood on one
portion of Palestinian land and prevented the establishment of a
Palestinian state on the remainder.
The Zionist movement, which aspired to create a purely Jewish state, could
not accomplish this aim when so many of the indigenous people still
remained despite the systematic ethnic cleansing it carried out on the eve
of Israel's creation, and which it continues to implement today. In 1967,
Israel occupied the remaining portions of Palestine, established martial
law and set in motion a series of measures that were part of an overall
strategy to drive as many Palestinians as possible from these territories
as well. In blatant defiance of the Fourth Geneva Convention and other
international laws, the occupation government halted all property
registration procedures to facilitate the confiscation of land and the
construction of Jewish settlements, seized control of all water resources
and instituted an array of measures to prevent the free movement of
Palestinians into and out of the occupied territories.
These and other measures succeeded in turning tens of thousands more
Palestinians into refugees and preventing those that remained from using
vast tracts of their own land, as large, strategically located settlements
cropped up in their midst. Israeli strategists knew that a solution would
have to be found to the lands it occupied in 1967.
The changes these measures effected on the ground were guaranteed to
sustain and consolidate Israeli control over the occupied territories and
obstruct a solution, as has been patently obvious in all
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.
The Palestinian people have responded to the occupation through various
forms of resistance, culminating in the first Intifada, which threw
everyone -- particularly the Israelis -- into disarray by making it clear
that the Palestinian people refused to surrender to the status quo and
remained determined to obtain independence. The Intifada, as a form of
peaceful protest, succeeded in rallying international public opinion
behind the Palestinian people and embarrassing Israel and its supporters.
Violent repression proved insufficient as a means of ending the Intifada.
For this and other reasons, the negotiating process began, leading to the
Oslo accords and subsequent arrangements.
The second Intifada was sparked by Ariel Sharon's visit to Al- Haram Al-Sharif
and, the following day, by the massacre of Palestinians prevented from
praying at that sacred site. Palestinian anger had accumulated since the
beginning of the negotiating process due to Israeli repression, which made
life for the Palestinians worse than it had been before, even during the
first uprising. In addition, successive Israeli governments, both Labour
or Likud, made it perfectly clear in the negotiations that they did not
seek a just and lasting peace and had no intention of granting the
Palestinians even their most basic legitimate rights. Compounding
Palestinian frustration was the US's unmitigated support for all Israeli
positions, Europe's indirect (and sometimes direct) complicity and Arab
governments' inability to counter either of these obstacles to Palestinian
liberation.
Last stand before the bulldozers
Stripped of all external assistance, the Palestinians were edged into
a corner, a process epitomised by Camp David II, in which Clinton and
Barak hoped to coerce Arafat into an agreement that fell far short of
Palestinian demands. When these negotiations collapsed, the US
administration blamed Arafat and set into motion a propaganda campaign
that sought to convince US and international public opinion that the
Palestinians had spurned generous Israeli offers. In fact, Barak had only
proposed a portion of the West Bank without Jerusalem, refusing to
dismantle Israeli settlements (which were to be annexed to Israel), and
essentially presenting a formula for a nominal Palestinian state that
would remain firmly under Israel's heavy thumb.
This Intifada, like its predecessor, has been a spontaneous response to
objective necessities. There was no prior planning and no unified
leadership. Because the fate of all Palestinians was in the balance, it
mobilised popular energy far surpassing expectations of participation and
self-sacrifice. Palestinian participation inside Israel was also very
powerful, and threw Israel into greater confusion. Popular pan-Arab
solidarity threw the US into a panic over its interests in the region.
Israel's response to the Intifada was vicious. Live ammunition claimed
high fatalities, particularly among the young, and caused casualties among
local and foreign journalists. The blockades, closures and other measures
to prevent the free movement of individuals were also harsher than ever
before. Indicative of the fascist attitudes of the Israeli government was
that guards were withdrawn and replaced by trenches or walls; while
checkpoint guards might have allowed the ill, aged or pregnant women
passage in order to reach hospitals, these stones remained impassive,
thereby adding other victims to the terrifying list of casualties.
The Arab governments proved incapable of taking effective action against
the Israeli occupation, bolstered by American support, European silence
and the absence of the UN, whose decision to form an international force
to end the violence was supplanted by the US Mitchell committee and the
refusal to send international observers into the territories. Israel
further exploited these circumstances to escalate its crimes against the
Palestinians with particular ferocity after the election of war criminal
Ariel Sharon.
More relentlessly besieged than ever and without effective support from
abroad, the Palestinians intensified their mass protest movement and began
to launch retaliatory armed attacks on Israeli settlers and to carry out
suicide bombings inside Israel. The sole aim of these desperate measures
was to tell Israelis, and the world beyond, that Sharon's policy would not
bring the security he had promised and that only an end to the occupation
and the restitution of Palestinian rights would end the violence. The
escalation of violence on the Palestinian side was a reaction to the
unequivocal message the Israelis had delivered by electing Sharon: the
majority favoured harsher repression, rejected the negotiating process and
the Mitchell report, and refused to halt settlement construction.
During their crack-down on the Palestinians, the Israelis committed
numerous crimes against humanity and breaches of humanitarian law.
Occupation forces deliberately fired live ammunition at close range on
unarmed protesters, claiming 309 deaths and 10,603 wounded in the first
three months of the Intifada alone. Because of the immense damage that
media coverage of these crimes caused Israel's propaganda and
international prestige, journalists, too, were deliberately targeted and
intimidated, while many others were prevented from reaching the scene of
events or saw their equipment confiscated and destroyed. Nor were the
internationally recognised symbols of the Red Cross and Red Crescent
immune to Israeli brutality. Ambulances and medical teams came under
frequent Israeli fire, preventing them from reaching the victims of
Israeli terror to administer first aid or take them to hospital. The death
toll at roadblocks, where emergency cases were prevented from reaching
hospitals, suffices to illustrate the scale of this crime.
The demolition of Palestinian homes and property has long been a component
of Israel's systematic policy of ethnic cleansing, and during the second
Intifada the process intensified, bringing into service for the first time
advanced weaponry such as F-16, F-15 and Apache fighter planes to bomb
residential quarters, with particular emphasis on areas bordering Israeli
settlements.
Among the most flagrant of Israel's violations of humanitarian law has
been its unwavering pursuit of a policy of collective punishment, through
the closure and isolation of entire Palestinian cities, villages and
camps. The policy has succeeded in reducing life in the occupied
territories to an intolerable daily torment: it has crippled the
Palestinian economy, devastated the urban infrastructure and disrupted the
activities of all PA agencies, particularly in the public service sector.
In its sustained campaign of attrition, the government has also recruited
Jewish settlers to wage often deadly physical assaults against Palestinian
civilians.
Under Sharon, Israeli forces violated all agreements concluded with the
Palestinians by entering PA-controlled areas and destroying government and
residential buildings, acts that resulted in numerous military and
civilian casualties. Basking in international complicity, the Sharon
government made public its extrajudicial assassination policy, bringing in
its massive arsenal of fighter planes, helicopter gunships, tanks and
missiles.
In the thick of this massive inhuman assault on life and dignity,
Palestinian, Arab and international human rights organisations have worked
to document Israel's atrocities and analyse them in terms of international
humanitarian law. Unfortunately, their efforts to disseminate this
information at international forums have come up against a seemingly
impenetrable brick wall of double standards and political pacts that place
Israel above the law and allow it commit what can only be called crimes
against humanity.
This is not a theoretical concern: more Palestinians are dying every day.
The Middle East will not see peace and security until the Palestinians
obtain the rights due to them under UN resolutions and international law.
Moreover, those who support Israeli aggression are not only abetting the
violation of Palestinian rights, but are undermining the long-term
interests of Israeli Jews, whose government's policies have failed to
bring them the security they so desire. The resolutions adopted by the NGO
Forum in Durban mark out the only path to a solution that will benefit all
parties.
* The writer is executive director of LAW, the Palestinian
Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment.
q |
Subscribe
Now
|
