Mechanisms Of
Dispossession
By Ghali Hassan
07 April, 2005
Countercurrents.org
In
his speech on Tuesday 15 March 2005, to mark the opening of a new Israeli
memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, Mr. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary
General said; "Our global mission of peace, freedom, and human
dignity, was literally forced in fire in fact the most awful fires that
mankind has ever seen". One wonders if Mr. Kofi Annan was speaking
on behalf of president George W. Bush or he is simply unaware of what
is happening around him. True, the Holocaust was a Supreme Crime, but
the world, and the 'West' in particular, is failing again to put an
end to similar crimes against the Palestinian people.
The Holocaust was
Europe 'Supreme Crime' against humanity. Although the systematic genocide
targeted various ethnic, religious and secular groups, European Jews
were the main targets. It was therefore referred to by the German Nazis
as the "final solution to the Jewish Question". The total
death toll is estimated at between 12 and 26 million people. Today the
commonly used figure of six million is the number of Jewish victims
of the Holocaust. More than 20 million Russians died to liberate Europe
from the scourge of Fascism. Moreover, as the Holocaust of the Jews
ended in Europe, the Palestinian people were added to its list of victims
in 1948. The Holocaust has been and stills Israel and the West moral
compass card.
Like the 'anti-Semitism'
card, the Holocaust is used to blackmail any criticism of Israel's crimes
against the Palestinian people. The cliché goes like this: what
ever the Israelis do to the Palestinians, is justified on the basis
that; it is not the Holocaust yet. "The Holocaust overshadows everything
the Israeli people think and do. Our attitude is conditioned by the
Holocaust. It conditions Israel to justify any means because compared
with the Holocaust any bad things we do are negligible by comparison.
It is a standard of comparison, which gives a kind of moral permit to
do anything. In a way we are still victims of the Holocaust today but
in a different way. It twists our outlook on things", writes Uri
Avnery of Gush Shalom in Tel Aviv.
Arabs or Muslims
were not responsible for any crimes against Jews. In fact, thousands
of Jews found safety among Muslims. The creation of Israel in 1948 in
Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian people designed to remove
European guilt and installed a European imperialist outpost in the world's
most vital energy rich region. In fact many Jews advocated a homeland
in South America or Uganda in Africa than in small and resources-scarce
Palestine, but Zionists and their Christian supporters decided on biblical
Palestine.
The Palestinian
people have had to pay for crimes committed by others. The factual information
given thus far is designed to explode the myth propagated by Zionists
that the enmity between Muslims (Arabs) and Jews is of ancient origin.
This is obviously not true. According to credible historical records,
Jews and Muslims have lived together for centuries, from Baghdad and
Istanbul to Palestine and Casablanca both communities coexisted peacefully.
The "Arabs' opposition to Zionism wasn't based on anti-Semitism
but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of their
people". It is Israel and the occupation of Palestinian land that
is the root cause.
Over 800,000 Palestinians
were expelled from the country and forced to become refugees in the
Arab states. In what Palestinians call "the Catastrophe,"
Jewish terrorist groups such as Haganah, Irgun and Stern were commanded
to terrorise the Palestinian populations. More than 450 towns and villages
were destroyed to prevent the return Palestinians, and in many cases
the entire Palestinian population were massacred. Today, the UN Relief
and Works Agency (UNRWA) estimates that there were more than 7 million
Palestinian refugees and displaced persons at the beginning of 2003.
Most Palestinian refugees are scattered in refugee camps in neighbouring
countries and in the West Bank and Gaza, living in appalling conditions
and unable to return to their homeland.
Israel's mechanisms
of dispossession the Palestinian people are supported by the Western
powers, particularly, the British and US governments. Since 1948, the
Israeli government and Jewish terrorist groups embarked on countless
genocides to "redeem" Palestine from the native Palestinian
people. Today, Israeli terrorism against the Palestinian people is well-organised
policy. The policy is recognised by the US and European governments,
and supported by massive Western investments and financial aids.
Israel does whatever
the world doesn't like. Israel's invasions and wars are called 'self-defence'.
In addition to Palestine, in the 1967 war, Israel occupied and illegally
annexed the Syrian province of Al-Quenitra, known the Golan Heights.
The Israeli army destroyed 250 Syrian villages and expelled more than
150,000 Syrian and Palestinian inhabitants. Israel still illegally occupies
territory in Lebanese. It is easier today to talk and make threats against
Syrian security troops in Lebanon, than point the finger at Israel occupation
and aggression. Palestinians who remains under Israeli occupation are
continuously detained, abused, tortured and murdered by the Israeli
army.
As the Israeli human
rights attorney Shamai Leibowitz writes; "From 1986 to 1991 I served
in the Israeli army in the occupied territories. During this period
I was shocked and disgusted at what my comrades and I were repeatedly
ordered to do to Palestinian civilians. To crush the uprising for independence
and statehood, we were ordered to brutalize them. In one of our army
bases in the West Bank, there was a mysterious room. Every day we watched
Palestinians being led into it. After a couple of days our
commanders would lead the Palestinians out, black and blue from bruises
and their faces swollen. They resembled sacks of potatoes more than
human beings". This was exactly what the Nazis did to Jews in Auschwitz
torture chambers. The only one thing lacking in Israel's' treatment
of the Palestinian people are the Gas Chambers of the Nazis. It should
be noted that the prelude to the Jewish Holocaust was German racist
attacks against minorities, and Germany's 1930s law to confiscate land
and property owned by German Jews for the purpose of creating an 'Aryan
only' German nation. As a result many German Jews lost their homes and
property, and forced to leave. The same policy of dispossession is now
implemented by the Israeli government and based on the old policy of
"redemption of the land"- the forcible ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians - to create an only Jewish state. Israel policy of dispossession
is also extended to the one million Palestinians ('Israeli Arabs') living
in Israel and under Israeli jurisdiction. Israeli Arabs are unable to
built homes or buy land
anywhere in Israel.
The practice of
Palestinians dispossession is continuing with the full support of the
Israeli government and its institutions in Israel and funded by Jewish
organisations abroad, such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the
World Zionist Organization (WZO). Well-armed Jewish colonisers (settlers)
are conducting daily pogroms against defenceless Palestinian families,
farmers and school children in order to force them to leave their land.
Under the eyes of watching Israeli soldiers, the settlers are committing
daily atrocities; from murdering Palestinians to cutting down thousands
of Palestinian olive trees, and poisoning Palestinian livestock. A Palestinian
mother of four children called these violent settlers "the Nazis
of our times", when the family was attacked by the armed groups
of Israeli
Talmudic settlers.
Israeli colonies
(settlements) continue to expand even beyond the Jewish settlers need
for housing. As Gush Shalom reports; "Although there are 3,700
vacant houses in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, some
6,130 other houses are under construction. In the largest West Bank
settlement of Maale Adumim, 47% of the housing units remain unsold,
and the figure soars to 97% in Givat Ze'ev, north of Jerusalem".
The recently resurrected Absentee Property Law of 1950 is implemented
in full swing to not only to confiscate thousands of Palestinian property
in East Jerusalem, but also to completely strangle and ghettoise Arab
East Jerusalem and isolate it from the West Bank .The Law is the relic
of Israel's policy of ethnic cleansing the Palestinian people in 1948.
It should be borne in mind that all these "outposts" and settlements
are illegal under international law have been approved by the Sharon
government (Ha'aretz, 11, March 2005). As I write, the Sharon government
is building 3,500 homes on confiscated Palestinian land to form a corridor
between Jerusalem and the largest West Bank settlement, Maale Adumim.
The US administration opposes the expansion of any settlement activity
in public, but records show that the US administration has been funding
and encouraging the building of these illegal settlements for years.
According to Israeli
journalist Amira Hass, the dispossession of the Palestinians is a matter
of government policy. She writes; "From July 2005, the Palestinian
residents of East Jerusalem, carriers of Israeli IDs, will no longer
be permitted to enter Ramallah. That is when construction [of the
Apartheid Wall] will be completed and the Erez-type passage at Kalandia,
deep inside Palestinian territory. Only those who obtain an entry permit
(and experience teaches us how difficult that is) will be permitted
to pass.I asked the Prime Minister's Office and the IDF whether this
doesn't this contradict two developments: first, permission for residents
of East Jerusalem to vote in the elections for the head of the Palestinian
Authority, and second, the possibility of calm and a return to final
status negotiations. I received no answer. That silence tells us, just
as the bulldozers and the soldiers who already prevent Jerusalem Palestinians
from travelling to Ramallah tell us, that Israel is following her plan:
East Jerusalem will be separated from Ramallah, and of course from Bethlehem".
The Apartheid Wall,
declared illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), continues
moving outside the 1967 boundaries and confiscates Palestinian land
in the West Bank and around Jerusalem. The main purpose of the Wall,
which is also called the "War Wall", is to isolate Palestinians
from each other and from their communities. Its route is directed to
confiscate Palestinian fertile land and water resources and further
shrinking what is left of Palestine. Palestinians are the most water-deprived
people on the planet, while Jews in the Occupied Palestine enjoy swimming
pools life style. Meanwhile Israel Ha'aretz newspaper reports that Israel
is start dumping 10,000 pounds of garbage a month inside the West Bank
against international law. The garbage dump will jeopardize water sources
in the West Bank and increases fly numbers and air pollution.
Israel's occupation
of Palestinian land and Israel's policy of erecting new settlements
and "outposts" on Palestinian land are illegal and criminal.
The policy is currently used in parallel to the so-called "Gaza
disengagement", a PR exercise by the Sharon government to manipulate
public opinion in
favour of Israel. The aims are to incarcerate more than 3.7 million
Palestinians in few disjoined cantons (native reserves) on 10-15% of
the original Palestine, completely surrounded and controlled by the
Israeli army and the Apartheid Wall, ensuring the impossibility of viable
state. This is what Israel is seeking; remove the Jewish colonies in
Gaza and grab as much land from Palestinians in the West Bank as possible.
Gaza will remain a prison within a prison. The Palestinians there are
trapped like mice, and at the mercy of the Israeli army and US F-16.
More than 60 years
of occupation, abuse, torture and genocide the Palestinian people still
have to achieve the West classification of "victims" despite
Israel's daily atrocities. The Palestinians are incarcerated and killed
on daily basis by Israeli army. The crimes against the Palestinian people
perpetuated by the Israeli government provoked not much outrage on the
part of Jews in Israel or outside of Israel, where the majority of Jews
live, or on the part of people in the West. Complicit in all these mechanisms
of dispossession of the Palestinian people is the US. For years, American
taxpayer money has funded Israel's Occupation of Palestine - the torture
chambers, the military apparatus, the bulldozers used in house demolitions,
the building of settlements and now the construction of the Apartheid
Wall.
"Most tragically,
American support for Sharon's settlement project destroys forever the
possibility of a viable Palestinian state, dooming the peoples of Israel-Palestine
to perpetual conflict. How this squares with American interests in a
stable Middle East is anybody's guess", writes Jeff Halper, Coordinator
of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. As long as Israeli
crimes continue against the Palestinian people, the world community
is failing to remove the scourge of the Holocaust. One cannot protect
one community, and at the same time look the other way to victimise
another community.
The time has come
for the world community of peoples to put a stop on Israel's crimes
against the Palestinian people. It's in the US and the American people
interests to try and promote a fair solution and stop Israel's colonial
war and policy of dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Ghali Hassan lives
in Perth, Western Australia.