A Palestinian Primer

A tell-tale sign of the totalitarian mind is the inversion of reality -- slavery is freedom, war is peace, occupation is liberation. Or in the maniacal universe of Secretary of State Albright, the Palestinians have, as she said on October 8th's "Meet the Press," "placed Israel under siege." She claims, ghoulishly, that a stateless people armed primarily with rocks, though under military occupation, are laying siege to a nuclear power which employs tanks and helicopter gunships, a nuclear power backed by the most colossal superpower in history. Yet this elicits no derisive laughter from ranks of media punditry. In fact, Tim Russert castigated Albright for failing to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel's most recent crimes.

The occupied West Bank consists of enclaves surrounded by the Israeli military and administered by compliant Palestinian bosses, a state of affairs that's been described as "Bantustan-style arrangements," with similar arrangements in Gaza. Scott Burchill says of the plight of the Palestinians

When not completely withheld, their basic rights and entitlements are represented as concessions generously granted by their overlords. Meanwhile their leaders, frightened of losing their elite privileges and affluent lifestyles, collude with Israel in their betrayal.

Arafat's corrupt and repressive regime is backed by both the CIA and Israel's Mossad and has obligingly beaten, imprisoned, or tortured critics, both violent and peaceful, of the so-called peace process. Chomsky notes that the peace process is by definition "whatever the US government happens to be pursuing." Thus the US can work to abort genuine moves toward a just settlement and still have its efforts labeled by the US media as part of a peace process. Viewed in this its actual context, Palestinian outrage is anything but irrational.

The trigger for the recent turmoil was right-wing, Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon's visit to Haram al Sharif, a Muslim holy site in Jerusalem, revered by Jews as the Temple Mount. Nearly all sane commentators, including Edward Said, maintain rightly that Sharon's September 28 visit could only have occurred with Ehud Barak's (at least) tacit acceptance, since the bloated old general appeared at the site with a thousand soldiers protecting him. Subsequently, Barak's approval rating leapt from 20% to 50%. The political significance of the visit was clearly articulated by Alex and Stephen Shalom.

Ariel Sharon...is no stranger to being vilified, or more precisely to being a villain. He is best-known for his role in Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, where -- as even the Israeli Kahan commission found -- he bore indirect responsibility for the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. He has long been an opponent of any negotiations with Palestinians and rejects any Israeli territorial concessions. Perhaps his visit to Haram al Sharif...was intended as a provocation to thwart any progress in the peace process (though no real progress was in the offing); perhaps he saw an opportunity to bloody some more Palestinians; or perhaps it was all part of a maneuver to secure his leadership of Likud against a challenge from former Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. But the exact mix of motives here doesn't really matter. No one could possibly have doubted that going to Haram al Sharif and proclaiming it eternal Israeli territory would ignite a firestorm.

The protests incited by Sharon's visit, and the Israeli army's attempt to silence them, have resulted in a death toll over 100 with more than 2,000 injured. The victims are overwhelmingly Palestinian. In the US press it's been said that the violence -- usually cast in the passive voice to avoid acknowledgement that most of the killing's been done by the US-armed Israeli military -- is endangering the peace process.

But that's exactly backwards. "The violence is not endangering the Middle East peace process," according to journlist Robert Fisk, the "Middle East peace process is dead, and that's why you've got the violence." Other observers have noted that the protests are not merely against Israel but against the corrupt Arafat regime as well -- a fact so far unreported by US media.

On October 7, the US was the only Security Council member to abstain from voting on Resolution 1233. It deplored the "provocation carried out at Al-Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem on 28 September 2000," condemning "acts of violence, especially the excessive use of force against Palestinians." It passed 14 to 0. NATO members Britain, Canada, Netherlands, and France all voted for the resolution.

Argentina's UN delegate said that "most members of the council have no problem with the resolution. It is a problem for the American delegation." The nauseating cowardice of the US abstention is compounded by the fact that the US's current UN Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, was, we are supposed to believe, so moved by the plight of the Kosovo refugees last year that he delivered the Rambouillet ultimatum that eventually led to NATO's humanitarian war. The inconsistency of Holbrooke's concern for displaced peoples passes without comment from US media, most of which, like Russert did with Albright, voiced displeasure with the US for not vetoing the resolution.

The Clinton administration refuses to recognize that the right to self-determination is universal. If a Palestinian pitches a rock or Molotov cocktail at the occupying Israeli army, he is laying siege to Israel, whereas a Serbian demonstrator hurling bricks or firebombs at Serbian police is a courageous democrat. The administration has its allies and enemies. In the media, allies are good and seek democracy, prosperity and peace, while enemies are bad and seek war, tyranny, and our undoing.

In Yugoslavia, the Milosevic regime, an obstacle to the further implementation of neoliberal economic policies in the region, has been expelled by a critical mass of popular discontent, although the possibility of a new wave of neo-liberal reforms looms large. And all of this passes without critical comment from the media. However in the Middle East the authority of one of the US's closest allies, which maintains an illegal military occupation, has been challenged. This is greeted with consternation by the media, which clearly acts only from the principle of toadying for the administration's whims.

It's recently been suggested that Israel's murder of nearly 100 Palestinians in the latest turmoil is an act of self-defense. It takes an extreme misanthropy to rationalize the wholesale slaughter of civilians as an act of self-defense. Doubtless apologists of Serbian paramilitary units or of KLA terrorism mirror such a perspective as do the many Russian cheerleaders of Putin's crusade in Chechnya or the barbaric Americans who justified the war against Vietnam.

No matter how fanatical the imperial fantasies of ethno-chauvinism, the central fact cannot be obliterated: its victims are human persons. Palestinians have the same right to self-determination as any other human persons on this planet. What stands between the Palestinians and the freedom of self-determination is nothing but maniacal bigotry in the service of imperialism.