Judging The Intifada
By Hasan Abu
Nimah & Ali Abunimah
06 October 2004
The Electronic Intifada
The
fourth anniversary of Israel's violent crackdown on the Palestinian
uprising, which coincided with its latest massacre of Palestinians in
the Gaza Strip, occasioned a number of analyses, many concluding
wishfully that the Intifada has been "counterproductive"
for the Palestinians, or even a "failure."
Ha'aretz analyst
Bradley Burston wrote an article headlined, "The war that Palestine
couldn't lose - and did." US Secretary of State, Colin Powell,
asked on Al-Jazeera, "What has [the Intifada] accomplished for
the Palestinian people? Has it produced progress toward a Palestinian
state? Has it defeated Israel on the battlefield?" Concluding it
had not, he declared, "it is time to end this process. It is time
to end the Intifada."
The standard that
Mr. Powell set for assessing Palestinian success or failure is disengenuous
and absurd. No one expected that Palestinians could defeat Israel's
astronomically superior, US-backed armed forces. But as the ongoing
resistance, both nonviolent and armed, demonstrates every day, the Palestinians
are not close to defeat, nor are the Israelis close to victory. Despite
all of Israel's killing and cruelty for decades, the Palestinians are
unbroken; they have neither abandoned their rights, nor resigned themselves
to living permanently under Israeli dictatorship.
Palestinians have
indeed paid a heartbreaking price during the past four years in death
and destruction inflicted by Israel. But that is not the only way they
measure the Intifada. Mr. Powell failed to ask how much the Palestinians
had gained from more than a decade of the American-sponsored "peace
process" and the "roadmap." He knows the answer: throughout
the period, Israel continued, with American connivance, to steal and
colonize the little left of their land at an accelerating pace, extinguishing
the prospects for a truly independent Palestinian state even as the
US claimed to be supporting it. The Intifada did not interrupt and "derail"
the peace process as revisionists argue; it came long after the peace
process failed, and as a direct result of this failure. As long as Palestinians
see that no outside powers will fairly uphold their rights, or international
law, some will always conclude that their only course is to impose as
a high cost as possible on Israel, no matter the cost to themselves.
This is what fuels support for counterattacks on Israeli civilians,
and indeed the willingness to die carrying them out. In a context where
Israel has left them nothing to lose, some Palestinians feel such attacks
are the only means they have to even the killing field.
Powell also did
not ask Israel how much its unrelenting brutality and colonization has
allowed Israelis to relax and enjoy the fruits of dispossessing the
Palestinians and depriving them of their basic rights. In addition to
losing more than one thousand people, Israel is wracked with corruption,
unemployment, poverty and mass emigration as a direct result of its
war to keep the Palestinians under occupation.
It is nevertheless
fashionable to point to the precipitous drop in Palestinian living standards
as further evidence of the failure of the Intifada, as New York Times
reporter Steven Erlanger did in an October 3 column. This economic collapse,
as numerous UN, EU and other bodies have reported over many years, is
the direct result of Israel's collective punishment of the population.
But rather than condemning the illegal measures of the occupier, some
seek to blame the victims for bringing it on themselves. Erlanger quoted
a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) that "although
the occupation and the confrontation with Israel that is entering its
fifth year provide the context, today's Palestinian predicament is decidedly
domestic." The ICG, which seems to exist solely to lend false credibility
to the most shallow, power-serving clichés, has once again issued
a report in which the hypothetical ideal is offered as the alternative
to grim reality, but without a single plausible suggestion for how to
get there, and with virtually all responsibility for action lying at
the door of the weakest party.
Such transparent
apologia for Israel is nothing new. From the first days of what began
as a peaceful uprising, to which Israel responded with one million bullets
in the first month of protests, Israeli and American analysts have been
declaring that the efforts to stop all resistance would soon succeed.
A few more assassinations, a few more missiles, a few thousand more
arrests, a bit more torture, a few hundred more demolitions, a little
more hunger and darkness and the Palestinians will get the message
and realize that their best option is servitude under occupation.
By any standard,
in a war between a colonial occupier and an indigenous people, the Palestinians
are in a comparable state to those who have trodden this path before
them. In Southeast Asia, the United States killed approximately fifty
Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians for every American who died in that
war, and still the Americans suffered a total strategic defeat. In Algeria,
the French killed on a similar scale and were defeated. In South Africa,
the apartheid regime killed hundreds of black South Africans for every
white person killed, and that regime no longer exists. Nor did massacres
and atrocities in Iraq in the 1920s, or India in the 1940s, save British
rule there. In colonial wars, the colonized always pay a much higher
price than their foreign rulers. The Americans and British are learning
afresh in the "New" Iraq that massive military dominance is
not the same thing as victory.
Israel, though,
stubbornly refuses to learn any lessons and thus spare Jewish and Arab
lives. As its situation has deteriorated, it has used ever more brutality
against the Palestinians, with increasingly meagre results from its
perspective. Strategically, Israel remains at an absolute dead end.
Despite all the talk of "disengagement," Israel has thrust
deeper into Gaza. It can neither afford to stay there, nor can it afford
to leave. Sharon's only reason for ever speaking of a withdrawal from
Gaza was to reduce the cost of the occupation to Israel and to consolidate
Israel's conquests in the West Bank. But the tenacity of the resistance
in Gaza and the West Bank shows that as long as Israel is determined
to colonize any inch of the occupied territories, it is necessarily
committed to staying in all of them. The logic of Israeli policy demands
ever deeper penetration and ever more savage measures.
South African law
professor John Dugard, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in
the Palestinian territories, wrote in a report to the General Assembly
last August that Israel has created, "an apartheid regime"
in the occupied territories "worse than the one that existed in
South Africa." Dugard is in a good position to know, since he was
a member his country's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Contrasting with
Dugard's forthrightness is the utter cowardice of those who talk loudest
about international law and human rights in the abstract. The United
States' pro-Israel position is the most extreme and biased, but has
lost the power to shock or disappoint. Yet the European Union, which
has for years posed as an even-handed force in the conflict, has long
since abandoned all serious efforts. European states now make empty
statements about adhering to the "roadmap" and calling for
Palestinian "reform," not because they believe genuinely that
such things are in any remote way related to a solution, but because
they realize that exposing the real problem Israel's intransigence
will lead to embarassing calls for sanctions against an outlaw
regime that recognizes no boundaries for its conduct.
Recently, UK prime
minister Tony Blair, the champion of democracy, human rights and freedom
in Iraq, made a personal committment to do everything possible to resolve
the Palestine-Israel conflict. Before the Iraq invasion, he made the
same promise on the BBC Arabic Service, responding to doubts about the
West's past performance by saying that a skeptical Arab public should
just wait, and judge him by his actions. More than a year has passed
and Blair has done absolutely nothing except vigorously oppose Palestinian
efforts to win their rights through the peaceful forum of the International
Court of Justice at The Hague.
The result of all
this is that Israel is ever emboldened, confident that it can do as
it pleases. Other than bleats of displeasure from Arab and international
officials, no one will act against it. Never has Ben-Gurion's infamous
maxim been more apt: "What matters is not what the Gentiles will
say, but what the Jews will do."
Those who wish to
mark the anniversary of the Intifada with a hard look at reality, rather
than self-delusion, might make the following predictions: there will
be no Palestinian state alongside Israel, because such a thing is impossible
in the reality Israel has, with the world's acquiescence, created. But
in another four years it will become clear that Israel can no longer
exist as a "Jewish state," superimposed on a Palestinian majority
that refuses to accept the inferior status Israel has assigned it, and
which Palestinians will continue to resist with whatever resources they
have.
In the meantime,
we can expect ever more horrifying violence that will not be abated
by ritual condemnations. And, as Israel gets further into its corner,
the chances increase dramatically that it will seek to resolve its existential
problem not just at the expense of the Palestinians, but by spreading
the conflict to its neighbors.
Ambassador Hasan
Abu Nimah is former permanent representative of Jordan at the United
Nations. Ali Abunimah is co-founder of the websites The Electronic Intifada
and Electronic Iraq.