[Peace-discuss] Nir Rosen on ME events

[Brussel]

The most compelling analysis I've seen.

Published on Monday, December 29, 2008 by The Guardian/UK

Gaza: The Logic of Colonial Power

by The Guardian/UK
As so often, the term 'terrorism' has proved a rhetorical smokescreen  
under cover of which the strong crush the weak
by Nir Rosen
I have spent most of the Bush administration's tenure reporting from  
Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have been  
published by most major publications. I have been interviewed by most  
major networks and I have even testified before the senate foreign  
relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with  
Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one  
of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying  
Palestinian land. Bush's final visit to the country he chose to  
occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes  
at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its  
dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated  
American regime.

Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population  
of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on  
TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action.  
Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with  
the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a  
surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public  
relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining  
the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.

The international community is directly guilty for this latest  
massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people?  
So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen,  
Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not  
forget. The Palestinians will not forget. "All that you have done to  
our people is registered in our notebooks," as the poet Mahmoud  
Darwish said.

I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those  
stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think  
America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the  
Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in  
American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the  
American government could bring about the needed changes. An American  
journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on  
whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be  
justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be  
asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a  
question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the  
Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty  
word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what  
the Other does, not what we do. The powerful - whether Israel,  
America, Russia or China - will always describe their victims'  
struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic  
cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining  
Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan - with  
the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed ... these will never  
earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and  
terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency , now popular again among in the Pentagon, is  
another way of saying the suppression of national liberation  
struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is  
winning hearts and minds.

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power  
determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal  
prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to  
resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented  
and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead  
of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality  
actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of  
international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes  
apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on  
legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to  
maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of  
resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent  
eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with  
the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine  
is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being  
eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way  
they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians  
strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native  
population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what  
is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native  
population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking  
away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming  
power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of  
resistance they can.

Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi , a Palestinian man from  
Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection.  
"The terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was  
shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians  
from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers  
were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were  
also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be  
demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a  
Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she  
threw acid n his face. "The terrorist was arrested by security  
forces," the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying  
soldier, and she is the terrorist?

In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could  
justify the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the US has  
killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated areas. When  
you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some  
"collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it  
is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era  
Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were  
worth it , as secretary of state Albright did, then you are  
deliberately killing people for a political goal. When you seek to  
"shock and awe", as president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are  
engaging in terrorism.

Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white  
Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the  
opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors  
and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were  
deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of  
their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by  
colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60- 
year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation  
movements the Palestinians established around the world. Every day,  
more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call  
oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of  
entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right  
to use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak  
have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage.  
The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made  
missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current  
context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits.

It is impossible to make a universal ethical claim or establish a  
Kantian principle justifying any act to resist colonialism or  
domination by overwhelming power. And there are other questions I  
have trouble answering. Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the  
United States? After all, his country was attacked without  
provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees created,  
hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings  
and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.

I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country's  
exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today's world,  
the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military- 
civilian network. And I could also say that Americans elected the  
Bush administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing  
to stop the war, and the American people themselves did nothing. From  
the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful  
aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable, and  
nothing the weak do is legitimate. It's merely a question of what  
side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.

Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt,  
Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership,  
to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty  
for their people, creating a first - a liberation movement that  
collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and,  
as usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster the  
candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough  
Arab blood on your hands. An Israeli general has threatened to set  
Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back  
decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel,  
power or food had not set it back decades already.

The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for  
destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world told  
the Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if the goal was  
to radicalise them further and as if that would not have a  
consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas's military forces.  
This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces and  
killing them, including some such as the chief of police, Tawfiq  
Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official who stayed on in his  
post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen to a society  
with no security forces? What do the Israelis expect to happen when  
forces more radical than Hamas gain power?

A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli  
settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long  
since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one  
state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be  
confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards  
an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la  
post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy  
as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave.  
Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been  
exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers  
who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to  
compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to  
further radicalise them?

Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the  
main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and  
beyond. But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and  
Afghanistan as additional grievances. America has lost its influence  
on the Arab masses, even if it can still apply pressure on Arab  
regimes. But reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing to  
do with America.

A failed American administration departs, the promise of a  
Palestinian state a lie, as more Palestinians are murdered. A new  
president comes to power, but the people of the Middle East have too  
much bitter experience of US administrations to have any hope for  
change. President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden and  
incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton have not demonstrated  
that their view of the Middle East is at all different from previous  
administrations. As the world prepares to celebrate a new year, how  
long before it is once again made to feel the pain of those whose  
oppression it either ignores or supports?

© 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited
Nir Rosen is a journalist specialising in US foreign policy in the  
Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. A fellow at the New York  
university center on law and security, his work has appeared in the  
Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker,  
Rolling Stone magazine, Harper's Magazine, the New Republic and  
Mother Jones. His book on postwar Iraq, The Triumph of the Martyrs: A  
Reporter's Journey into Occupied Iraq , was published in 2006. His  
articles are available at nirrosen.com




Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/12/29-7
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20081229/097e078e/attachment-0001.html