Isolated From
The Human Community Israel Builds Another Wall
By M. Shahid
Alam
19 July, 2004
Dissident
Voice
Before I built
a wall I'd like to know
What I was walling in or walling out.
Robert Frost
On
July 9, 2004, fourteen of the fifteen Justices on the International
Court of Justice delivered an 'advisory opinion' on Israel's apartheid
barrier that accurately reflects the world's growing moral outrage against
Israel's determination to push the Palestinians to the wall and beyond.
Appropriately--and yet, to our shame--the only contrary opinion was
rendered by Justice Thomas Buergenthal, an American.
The Justices declared
that the wall being built by Israel, "the occupying Power, in the
Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around Jerusalem, and
its associated régime, are contrary to international law."
The Justices informed
Israel that it is "under an obligation" to stop work on the
wall, dismantle those portions of the wall that have been built, annul
the legislative régime erected to support its construction, and
render compensation for the damage it has already inflicted on the Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories.
Finally, the Justices
called upon the United Nations--especially the General Assembly and
the Security Council--to "consider what further action is required
to bring to an end the illegal situation resulting from the construction
of the wall and the associated régime, taking due account of
the present Advisory Opinion."
In these dark times,
when American power has tied itself irrevocably--for the foreseeable
future--to every Zionist aim against the Palestinians, be it ever so
indefensible, the moral clarity of these judicial opinions will bring
hope and encouragement to ordinary humans who do not always find it
easy to sustain their struggle in the face of new oligarchies that practice
their dark craft in the name of the men and women they trample upon
methodically. Countering concerted pressure from the United States and
its allies, the fourteen Justices, five from the European Union, have
decided to apply the universal principles of justice to the actions
of an Occupation that in its malicious intent, its devastating effects,
its lengthening history, and its potential for fueling wars has no parallels
in recent times.
Yet, as predictably
as it is tragic, the Zionists in Israel and their allies in the United
States--both Christians and Jews--have responded to ICJ's 'advisory
opinion' with hollow clichés that carry little conviction except
with a segment of Americans, some of whom are avowed Christian Zionists,
others white supremacists, but most have been coaxed into hating Palestinians
by a media that is both mendacious and malicious in the ways in which
it constructs the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Palestinians are
terrorists and anti-Semites to boot; the Israelis, under threat and
in peril, are their innocent victims.
In editorials and
speeches ringing across Israel and America, a thousand apologists are
protesting that beleaguered Israel is building a 'security fence'--not
a wall--whose only purpose is to safeguard innocent Israeli civilians
against the primordial violence of Palestinians. In the columns of the
New York Times, of July 13 2004, a former Israeli Prime Minister, explains
that this "security barrier" is "temporary," it
extends into "less than 12 percent of the West Bank," and
it does not kill Palestinians, it merely harms their "quality of
life" while saving Israeli lives. The unsophisticate that he is,
the Israeli Prime Minister of course cannot appreciate that a 'reduced'
quality of life easily feeds into higher mortality. There are smarter
ways of killing than in death camps with poison gases.
If the League of
Nations, in the early stages of the Nazi campaign of ethnic cleansing,
had had the moral courage to ask the Permanent Court of International
Justice--the predecessor to the ICJ--to pass judgment on the legality
of this campaign that, at this stage, included the herding of Jews into
concentration camps, how might the Nazis have responded to an 'advisory
opinion' that declared the herding of Jews to be in violation of international
law and called the Nazis to immediately cease such actions?
The Nazis might
have chosen one of several arguments in their defense. Given the overt
racism of the times, they could have appealed to their historical right--as
communicated by the World Spirit--to exclusive ownership of the German
Deutschland; the Jewish interlopers in Germany had to be removed to
make room for the original and rightful owners. Had they taken a defensive
line, they might argue that the 'relocation' of Jews was a temporary
measure, undertaken in the face of clear intelligence of British plans
to use Jews as a fifth column in their war against Germany. Alternatively,
they might claim that this was a humanitarian move, gathering Jews into
districts set apart for them and where they would be free to observe
the halacha, which they had been unable to do in the past. They were
only making amends for past lapses. And, of course, they might have
claimed that the Justices were ganging up against them, singling them
out, driven by a new wave of anti-Germanism fomented by the British
and Americans.
There is a terrible
irony in the chorus of loud Zionist condemnations that have greeted
the ICJ's ruling. To the eternal shame of the times, when the Jews were
being herded into the concentration camps--where most of them would
die--they had very little help from the Allied powers, the self-designated
keepers of world conscience. The United States closed its doors to Jewish
immigration. Certainly, there were no rulings from the Permanent Court
on the barbarity of German plans of genocide. Bitterly, and justifiably,
the Jews have accused the world of letting them die in the Nazi terror.
No Courts, no governments offered effective support, material or moral.
No one came to the
support of the Palestinians either, as the British awarded their country
to the Zionists, as the British after occupying Palestine allowed European
Jews to settle the country, form militias, and prepare to drive out
the Palestinians. No Western publics raised a voice when 800,000 Palestinians
were terrorized into fleeing their homes in 1948 and stripped of their
right to return. No Western publics supported the Palestinians when
they began to resist the Israeli occupation of West Bank and Gaza. Instead,
taking the cue from Israel, the Western powers branded the Palestinians
as terrorists, and refused to recognize their existence as a people.
The moral indignation of the Western publics has only been aroused in
the past decade, starting with the First Intifada, which revealed the
brutal face of the Israeli Occupation, crushing, pulverizing, expropriating
a mostly unarmed people.
Yet the Zionists
today relentlessly accuse these Western publics of anti-Semitism, of
singling them out because they are Jews. For too long, the Zionists
have acted with impunity against the Palestinians, because they have
succeeded in using the Holocaust to shield themselves against the censure
of Western publics. That makes the Occupation a perfect crime, without
any perpetrators. Better yet: the perpetrators became the primary victims
of those they victimize.
However, lately,
world conscience has been stirring, waking up to the insufferable conditions
imposed upon Palestinians by the Israeli Occupation. World conscience
is affirming itself in a hundred ways: in the Internationals who risk
death to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes; in the willingness
of the Belgian Court to try Ariel Sharon for war crimes; in the reminders
by South Africans that this Occupation is worse than the Apartheid they
had endured; in the academics who initiated a movement to boycott Israeli
academics; in the students protesting investments in the Israeli economy;
in the world-wide marches, protests and activism against the Israeli
Occupation. And now the International Court of Justice has spoken, loudly
and clearly, against Israel's apartheid wall.
Indeed, increasing
numbers of Israelis are speaking out--even members of their armed forces,
those who have seen the ugliness of the Occupation at first hand because
they were its direct enforcers. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers have refused
to 'serve' in the West Bank and Gaza, risking jail sentences. Other
Jewish voices are being raised, warning that Israel is losing its soul,
that the Occupation is brutalizing young Israeli men and women, who
then brutalize their families, their spouses, their children. Increasingly,
Israeli soldiers are taking their own lives. This is not a distant colonial
Occupation, thousands of miles away from the European home base, that
could be held down by a handful of soldiers and hired natives. Every
Israeli--indeed a large segment of world Jewry--participates in this
Occupation.
Is there a danger
that the world may to begin to look upon Israel as the moral equivalent
in our own times of a Nazi Germany? This 'moral equivalence in our times'
does not require that Israel duplicate all the crimes of Nazi Germany.
Instead, the world will be asking if, relative to the morality and the
constraints of our times, Israel has gone as far as Nazi Germany did
in more barbarous times, when the extermination of 'inferior races'
was regarded as the right of White Europeans.
It would appear
that as Israel builds the apartheid barrier whose intent is to wall
the Palestinians in, sealing them inside a few miserable Bantustans,
it is simultaneously building another wall, invisible but no less solid
in construction, that is walling Israel out, disconnecting it from the
human community, its laws, its hopes and its sympathies. Increasingly,
in the years ahead, the world will be asking this question unless it
can see an end to the Israeli Occupation in sight.
M. Shahid Alam is
professor of economics at Northeastern University. Visit his website
at http:msalam.net. He may be reached
at [email protected]