Tariq Ali on Gaza
January 4, 2009The below article is from Counterpunch written by Tariq Ali regarding the attacks on Gaza by the Israeli State. And I agree when Tariq Ali argues: The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired.
And a single secular state is the only alternative. Two states argument is not only politically wrong and dishonest but geographically impossible. What will the Palestinian state be like? A Bantustan. Who will have the control of the airspace and substrata especially regards to extraction of artesian water…? And that will depend on what kind of settlement is reached and who gets what in relation to land. Again, the only equitable way forward is a single secular state.
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant by Tariq Ali
The assault on the Gaza Ghetto, planned over six months and executed with perfect timing was designed largely to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the Right and the Far Right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon a few years, sit back and watch. Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with Obama and Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet.
The EU politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians, etc [See Harvard scholar Sara Roy’s chilling essay in the latest LRB] were convinced that it was the rocket attacks that had ‘provoked’ Israel but called on both sides to end the violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarik dictatorship in Egypt and NATO’s favourite Islamists in Ankara, failed to even register a symbolic protest by recalling their Ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UNSC to discuss the crisis.
As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will be to inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the ranks of those very organisations that the West claims it is combating in the ‘war against terror’.
The bloodshed in Gaza raises broader strategic questions for both sides, issues related to recent history. One fact that needs to be recognised is that there is no Palestinian Authority. There never was one. The Oslo Accords were an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians, creating a set of disconnected and shrivelled Palestinian ghettoes under the permanent watch of a brutal enforcer.
The PLO, once the repository of Palestinian hope, became little more than a supplicant for EU money. Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. The West and Israel tried everything to secure a Fatah victory: Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the ‘international community’ in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the IDF, their posters confiscated or destroyed, us and EU funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and US Congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run. Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza—in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer: ‘the public will then support the Authority against Hamas’. Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this.
Hamas’s electoral triumph was treated as an ominous sign of rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures were applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those whom it defeated at the polls.
Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority’s combination of greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their acquiescence in a ‘peace process’ that has brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people. It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad basis of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran.
How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of IDF killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire, begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer despite the Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests, which followed, in which some three hundred Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank. On 19 August 2003 a self-proclaimed ‘Hamas’ cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in West Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire’s negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas in turn responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the EU declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization—a long-standing demand of Tel Aviv.
What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline—demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest armed oppression of modern history. ‘Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for forty-five years against occupation force’: the words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993.
The real grievance of the EU and US against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The West’s priority ever since was to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas—as publicly picked for his post by Washington, as was Karzai in Kabul—at the expense of the Legislative Council is another.
No serious efforts were made to negotiate with the elected Palestinian leadership. I doubt if Hamas could have been rapidly suborned to Western and Israel but it would not have been unprecedented. Hamas’s programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether, or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the pathetic minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the history of Fatah has shown. The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of Western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling tradition. Soon after the Hamas victory I was asked in public by a Palestinian what I would do in their place. ‘Dissolve the Palestinian Authority’, was my response and end the make-belief. To do so would situate the Palestinian national cause on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equitably, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size—not 80 per cent to one and 20 per cent to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the long run. The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired.
There is no other way. And Israeli citizens might ponder the following words from Shakespeare [The Merchant of Venice] that I have slightly altered:
‘I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that…the villainy you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’
Also check out Tony Greenstein’s excellent blog.
Have a look too at From Gaza blog
I share totally Tariq’s appraisal. The one state solution is the only solution. I was moved to re-read part of Vadana Shiva’s excellent book ‘Water Wars’ (Pluto Press 2002). Water was at the heart of the formation of the state of Israel “It is necesary that the water sources, upon which the future of the Land depends,should not be outside the borders of the future Jewish hoimeland” wrote Ben-Gurion in 1973. But it just happens that some 70% of the water consumed in Israel comes from the river Jordan and the underground aquifers in the terittory described as the West Bank. A Palestinian state based on this would control the majority of Israels water supplies – it will never happen. An example – in 1999 Palestinians were allowed to build 7 wells none more than 140 meters deep, Jewish wells with no limit on number could be as deep as 800 meters. Any bantustans that may be built under a two state solution will be carefully designated so that they have no direct water supplies of their own, only those amounts that the Jewish state will allow.
I find myself coming round to the one state solution the more I think about it, having once been a two-stater (and non-socialist ones at that). What’s important though is we pose it in such a way so as not to give the pro-Israeli camp a gift. For example, emphasising its multinational, multi-faith, secular and federal characters would be a start.
I utterly agree with Ali. The palestinians and the Israelis have one option only and that is one State with two equal partners. Work must focus now on making both sides, at grass root level, believe that this is the only way forward. We must start seeing togetherness in this for our children and their children. With the way things are now there is not hope for either side.
An insightful and well written analysis by Tariq Ali. His analysis of Western powers’ machinations while aiding the destruction of a people’s resistance could apply as well in Sri Lanka, (substituting Sinhalese for Israelis and Tamils for Palestinians), and so, I would presume, it would work as a description of the conditions of very many other conflicts in the world, not only those prominent in the Western media but also those whose stories are suppressed where the US and EU exigencies are nevertheless very much present. Though perhaps what makes the situation between Hamas and Israel particularly unusual is Hamas’s rejection of the existence of Israel, the equivalent of which few resistance struggles would even consider in their own conflicts.
However, after such an eloquent analysis, Tariq Ali comes to a conclusion that is fantasy itself. A single state? Where is the basis for such an outcome, except (in spite of their assurances that they support a two state solution) in the exigencies of the US and EU? Does Ali share ultimately the world view of the very powers he discredits?
For a state to come into being and continue to be viable, the peoples who populate that state need a shared culture – shared values. The problem, as ever, usually lies with the oppressor culture. What would it take for Israeli people to value their Palestinian sisters and brothers as equals? It would be the very least that would be required to form a single modern state, as opposed to a single slave state. The current culture in Israel, a culture that portrays Palestinians as subhuman and permits their persecution, lacks any minimum requirement for a shared state. Without a shared culture of regarding each other as equals (culture cannot simply be decreed, culture is made up of values that are deeply felt, deeply believed) any imposed single state would only result in a slave state, where Palestinian lives would be violated continuously. Enforcing such a solution without the minimum values of a shared culture already in place, would act to undermine all that the Palestinians have fought so long and hard for. In such a climate, if the Palestinians themselves were not strong enough to insist on an equitable distribution of resources, who could? The US and EU? The very powers the have pursued the destruction of Palestinian resistance to Israeli agression all these decades?
Unfortunately the ‘left’ is guilty of consistently putting forward a ‘one-state-fits-all’ solution everywhere and that is where the imperialist tendencies of the left work on the same side as right wing imperialist tendencies – so that they both sound the same…even though after all these years we should have learnt something about Russian imperialism with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. If we’re talking about human rights, only a Palestinian living in Palestine can voice their rights, no one can do that on behalf of them, and clearly in spite of all the underhand measures to force them to do otherwise they’ve exercised their right to choose Hamas to represent them. They certainly don’t conceive of a single state as the future entity for them to uphold their rights, and Tariq Ali does them a disservice in his own cant.
Kothai, any two state solution will only favour Israel – an empty land for a landless people remember?
Gaza and the West Bank have been split for many years, a split that enables the Israeli’s to carry out todays atrocities with impunity. The West Bank is already being split into cantons or more approriately Bantustans that can easily be isolated in the way Gaza is now. At the very least a two state solution requires a return to the pre-67 borders which would leave Palestinians in anarea where they could unite quite strongly, something Israel would never allow, they would never allow East Jerusalem to be part of a West Bank Palestine let alone its capital city.
A single state solution would mean the Iraeli government making massive concessions which a large number of Palestinians may be prepared to accept in a spirit of equality. Not every Israeli is anti Palestine, far from it, what they want is peace and if they get that by sharing within a federal state the response would, I believe , be quite remarkable. My experience of living close to the West Bank and making many friends on both sides suggests that this kind of shared state would probably take the sting out of the extremists on both sides.
Do not forget many of those leaders in Israel today calling Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists were exactly that themselves in the 1940’s.
But lest we forget what is happening now is not about one or two states, its about who becomes the next Israeli Prime Minister and the US would be happy with either Netanyahu or Livny.
Pete, the Palestinians have made it clear that they want a two state solution, and something near the pre-67 borders is what they are fighting for, we should honour that, it is their dignity and survival that is at stake and they are the best people to decide what would give them a viable future, not any imperious outsiders. I think they are being realistic about what it would require for them to begin rebuilding their own economic, social and physical well being. Anything less (a one state solution, or a fragmented Palestinian state), would continue the war endlessly – people will always continue to fight until they have at least the minimum for their survival and well being.
Why should we abandon what Palestinians have declared they need and say it is pointless fighting for that simply on the grounds that Israel will not accept it. The more we give in to what we think Israel will and will not accept to fashion a solution, the more we are capitulating to Israel demands just because they are the more powerful, and why should we give them the power to decide the fate of the people they are victimising? The more we capitulate the more we undermine Palestinians and their struggle for justice. The issue is about supporting what the Palestinian people want, that is the only issue the true left wing and other humanitarians should be concerned with.
There are many well intentioned Europeans in all the conflicts around the world who think that because they can make friends on both sides and find decent individuals who could get along together that means there is evidence that two whole nations could share a state in harmony. It is far from the truth when one nation is more powerful than the other and is hostile towards them. Being in control of a state gives a nation the overwhelming power of the state which they can use to dominate and persecute people within the state as much as they want. I speak from my own experience of Sri Lanka (where I am from), that a racist state is the worst genocidal scenario you could ever wish on a subject people. It is not about a few nice individuals (as in Sri Lanka there are very many nice Sinhalese, and very many nice Tamils – but that is not the point at all). It is about how structural power works through individuals (who would otherwise be very nice people) and how other individuals greedy for power can use state power to dehumanise others. When you have the power of the state and a racist intent you have the recipe for total domination. And if the rest of the world community has stood by while Palestinians are destroyed now, they’ll turn a total blind eye once the Palestinians are absorbed into an Israeli dominated state and destroyed that way.