[Peace-discuss] Get this, Israel.

[Morton K. Brussel]

Counterpunch - Dec 15, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley12152006.html

When There's No One Left to Blame

What Are You Going to Do Now, Israel?

By VIRGINIA TILLEY
Johannesburg, South Africa

What are you going to do now, Israel?

Now that three small boys have been killed by assassins' bullets, and a
Hamas judge dragged from his car and murdered, perhaps you are pleased.
The Palestinians are finally succumbing to your plots, you think. The
long-planned bottle has finally been sealed, in which the "drunken
cockroaches" can only crawl around, shooting each other.

Maybe you are sitting back in your national chair, rubbing your hands
together in triumph, watching the Palestinians finally turn on each
other, slowly becoming what you always claimed they were. Maybe you are
repelled, secure in your sense of superiority.

But have you thought about what you are you going to do, if Palestinian
leadership you despise finally disintegrates?

You have brought them to this pass, of course. You worked for decades
to achieve exactly this. You bribed, terrorized, expelled, maimed or
killed their leadership, banned or killed their visionaries and
philosophers, fanned and funded Hamas against Fatah or Fatah against
Hamas, trashed their democracy, stole their money, walled them in, put
them on a "diet", derided their claims, and lied about their history to
the world and to yourself.

But what are you going to do, Israel, if five million Palestinians are
finally living leaderless under your sovereignty? What will you do,
when they lose their capacity to negotiate with you? Have you thought
that, within the territory you control, they are as many as you? And
that now you are destroying their unified voice? Have you thought about
what will happen to you if they truly lose that voice?

Maybe you really believe that, if you only feed Fatah money and guns,
Fatah will reclaim power from the Hamas and restore the craven puppet
Palestinian government of your dreams. Maybe you actually believe that
Fatah can revive the wreck of Oslo, step out of the rubble of PA
offices, and reclaim the driver's seat of the Palestinian nation as
before. Maybe you are telling yourself that, with just a few more
inter-factional scuffles and assassinations and little more starvation,
the entire Palestinian people will turn on Hamas and eject it from
power in favor of grinning Mr. Abbas.

But why would you believe all this, when the only other test-case,
Iraq, is in ruins and the US and UK are desperately trying to flee?

Do you really still live so deeply in your own fantasies that you
believe Palestinian resistance is just the product of bad or obdurate
leadership? That no collective memory of expulsion and dispossession
sustains the spirit of collective resistance that will always and
inevitably transcend that leadership? Do you really believe that, if
only you can crush or co-opt Hamas and Fatah, five million people will
simply disappear forever from your world--trail off across the
Jordanian or Egyptian borders into the endless desert, clutching
clothes, kids, and tarnished mementos, in some great reprise of 1948?

Do you actually think that, if the international community finally lets
you off the hook of negotiating with the people you have dispossessed
and discredited, you will somehow walk free at last, your crimes
against them forgotten?

We know you are still pursuing the old, fatal, futile fantasy: finally
to redeem the Zionist dream by demolishing Palestinian nationalism. To
break Palestinian national unity on the rocks of occupation. To reduce
the Palestinians to Indians on reservations who decline into despair,
alcoholism and emigration. To make them irrelevant to you.

But here is news for you, Israel. The Native Americans haven't given up
to this day. Damaged and reduced as they are, they know their history
and remember their grievances. They are marginal only because they are
one percent of the US population. The Palestinians are five-million
strong, equal to you in numbers. And they live within your borders.
When their leadership ruins itself, bashing each other like rams
fighting to the death, they will finally turn their five million pairs
of burning eyes on you, for you will be the only power left over them.
And you will be defenseless, because your paper shelter - your Fatah or
PA quislings - will be damaged goods, cracked vessels, discredited,
gone. And it will then be you and those you have disenfranchised - you
and the Palestinians, in one state, with no Oslo or Road Map myth to
protect you. And by then, they will truly hate you.

Then perhaps it will dawn on you what you have done, when the
disintegration of Palestinian national unity spreads out like a tsunami
through the Middle East, meeting up with the tsunami spreading out from
Iraq, to lay the region waste and rebound on you.

Watching you create this catastrophe for yourself, we think you are
simply suicidal. We could just watch, but your road to ruin promises
too much suffering to too many people. Still, to avert your unilateral
suicide pact with the Palestinians, to whom can we turn? We could
appeal to Hamas at last to mobilize the rank and file, who alone have
the capacity to launch civil disobedience on the mass scale necessary
to paralyse Israel's iron fist, but Hamas has no experience with this
method, and now its statesmen are cornered by the guns you gave to
Fatah thugs.

We could appeal to the leader of the Fatah thugs, Mr. Abbas, shuffling
at the feet of Israeli power, to find some spine. Or to the ubiquitous
Mr. Erekat, who never had a political vision in his life, to develop
one overnight.

We could appeal to the Fatah thugs to reject Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erekat
and the fat cement contracts you gave them to build the Wall that
imprisons them, and seek a high road they have never glimpsed.

We could appeal to the microscopic PFLP and DFLP, clutching their old
programs too stale to chew and consumed by their acrid, decades-old
bitterness and rivalry with Fatah, to lift their heads at long last
beyond the old and new grievances.

We could appeal to the US, but no one bothers to do that.

We could appeal to the EU, but no one bothers to do that, either.

We could appeal to the world, but it only stands aghast.

We could appeal to the world media, but it is frozen with its ass in
the air.

We can only appeal to you, Israel. To think what you are doing, if not
to care.

For you are crafting your own destruction.

You have been so effective in this great national project because you
work from experience. Even the most courageous, principled, and
sensible people, as you learned, cannot withstand a concentration camp
indefinitely. At some point, as the Holocaust historians have tracked
with such pathos, humanity breaks down. Individual heroism may survive
as memoirs, but order, humanity, and finally human feeling decays into
factional squabbles and man's inhumanity to man. You learned all too
well and bitterly how this cauldron can melt down the very fabric of a
society and shatter people. The lesson is burned, literally, into your
national memory. And you are bringing those lessons to bear, attempting
to purge Zionism's tragedy by bringing Gaza to ruin.

But if you actually reap the chaos you are crafting for the
Palestinians, you will find that no one else is responsible for these
five million civilians except you.

So what will you do, Israel, with five million people living under your
rule, when you can no longer pretend to the world that you intend to
negotiate with them? What will you do with people you detest, and who
finally utterly detest you, when visions of coexistence have finally
failed? You will be the only sovereign power over them. You will be
able neither to digest them nor to vomit them out. And they will stare
at you. And we will stare at you, too.

Because there will be no one left to blame, and no one to take care of
them, except you.

[Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen
working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A
Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University
of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be
reached at tilley at hws.edu.]