{news} Israel's catastrophe -- by Ali Abunimah

[Justine McCabe]

A good summary of the debacle occurring in ME, and implicit support for the growing boycott/divestment/sanctions against Israel movement which GPUS has endorsed [http://www.green-party.org.il/public_statement.htm].

Justine McCabe
Co-Chair International Committee, GPUS    
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The Middle East debate

By Ali Abunimah

The Sunday Business Post (Ireland)
23 July 2006

http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=GUEST%20WRITER-qqqm=nav-qqqid=15886-qqqx=1.asp

Lacking in political and moral legitimacy, Israel exists
only due to the constant exercising of brute force and
American-supplied weapons technology, writes Ali Abunimah.

Israel wants us to believe that its wholesale destruction
of Lebanon and killing to date of nearly 400 civilians is
about the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah.

This focus on the "latest incident" is designed to
obscure what truly lies at the heart of this ongoing
conflict: Israel's violent takeover of Palestine.

Palestinians, expelled from their country in 1948, had
continued their struggle against Israel from Lebanon. In
1982, Israel invaded that country in an attempt to destroy
the Palestine Liberation Organisation, killing tens of
thousands of civilians. On that occasion, Israel's
official pretext was a failed assassination attempt
against its London ambassador.

Rather than ending resistance, Israel laid the seeds for
what we see today.

The mostly Shia villagers in southern Lebanon who bore the
brunt of Israel's 1982 invasion are the core constituency
of Hezbollah, founded in 1983 to resist Israel's
occupation.

The fighting in Lebanon, and to the south in Gaza, are
directly related to Israel's origins, and the regional
violence will only spiral until there is a just solution
to the Palestine question.

Israel was established in 1948 as an explicitly ''Jewish
state'' in a country whose overwhelming majority
population at the time was not Jewish and had no desire to
live under such a government. Such a project could only
generate enormous resistance.

Because of this, Israel has never gained legitimacy among
the people who paid the price for its creation.

Lacking such legitimacy, Israel exists only by the
constant exercise of brute force - first to expel the
majority of Palestinians, to prevent the return of
refugees and, after 1967, to settle as many of its Jewish
citizens as it could in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.

Zionist leaders hoped that the transformation of Palestine
from a multicultural, multireligious society into one
ruled exclusively by and for Jews would have been
completed by now, with the Palestinians merely a distant
memory.

Instead, Israel created a catastrophe.

Today because of their determination not to be driven from
what remains of their land, and due to their higher birth
rate, Palestinians are once again becoming the majority
population. Their struggle draws support across the Arab
world, including from groups like Hezbollah.

For the first time since the 1948 expulsions accompanying
Israel's foundation, Jews no longer form the absolute
majority in the territory they control.

Israeli and Palestinian official statistics count 5.3
million Jews living in Israel-Palestine and 5.6 million
non-Jews (this does not include millions more Palestinian
refugees outside the country).

Israeli leaders understand what this means. Prime minister
Ehud Olmert said in 2003: "We are approaching the point
where more and more Palestinians will say 'There is no
place for two states between the [River] Jordan and the
[Mediterranean] sea. All we want is the right to vote'.
The day they get it, we [Israeli Jews] will lose
everything."

Olmert added: "I shudder to think that liberal Jewish
organisations that shouldered the burden of struggle
against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle
against us."

The internationally-endorsed solution for the dilemma is a
complete Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied
in 1967 so that Palestinians can establish a state in
these areas, which amount to just 22 per cent of their
original homeland.

Unfortunately, Israel used the years of the peace process,
not to begin to end its occupation, but to entrench it -
doubling the number of settlers in the West Bank. While it
pulled 8,000 settlers out of Gaza last year, former
Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres explained on the BBC
in August: "We are disengaging from Gaza because of
demography."

Israel hoped that, distracted by the pulling out of a few
settlers, the world would not notice its continued
military control of Gaza, as well as its annexation wall
and the massive expansion of Jews-only colonies throughout
the West Bank.

Israel's full-scale assault on Lebanon and its
round-the-clock bombardment of Gaza have nothing to do
with the recent attacks on its army.

The indiscriminate killing of civilians can only be
understood as an attempt to put fear back into the Arabs,
in a desperate effort to maintain Israel as a
Jewish-dominated garrison state surrounded by concrete
walls.

But groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, which emerged as a
direct response to the brutality of decades of Israeli
occupation, and an absence of principled international
intervention, represent a generation no longer cowed by
Israel's US-supplied missiles and jets.

FW de Klerk, the last president of apartheid-era South
Africa, calculated when he took office that the white
government could retain power for many years, but only at
the cost of inflicting enormous casualties.

Both he and Nelson Mandela concluded that nothing could be
gained from further bloodshed and that the time had come
to negotiate the peaceful end of apartheid.

Looking back on the apartheid regime's long history of
violence, de Klerk wrote in his memoirs: "There is no
evidence that the assassination of opponents had the
slightest effect on the final outcome of the struggle,
other than causing further personal suffering and
bitterness."

It is only by ending their claims of superior rights and
power that Israeli Jews, like white South Africans, will
gain the legitimacy and acceptance from people in Lebanon,
Palestine and across the Middle East that cannot be won
with violence.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, and
author of the forthcoming book One Country: A Bold
Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

***********************************************

Ali Abunimah
http://electronicIntifada.net
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