In February 2008, Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai warned
that if Hamas continued firing rockets, they would bring upon
themselves a ’bigger shoah,’ the word used by Israelis to refer to the
Nazi genocide or holocaust. This statement came in the wake of attacks
on Gaza which left 32 Palestinians dead, including eight children, the
youngest a six-month-old baby. These regular attacks, combined with a
blockade which deprived Palestinians in Gaza of food, fuel, potable
water, medicines and educational materials, was the slow-motion shoah
which had been taking place up to December 27. The full-scale bombing
which began on that date is surely the ’bigger shoah’ promised by
Vilnai, and, according to Israeli reports, it was being planned as
long back as February [1].
There were demonstrations against the Israeli bombing by outraged
protestors throughout the world as the Palestinian death toll climbed
to more than 300 in as many days, but Palestinians in Gaza felt that
the international community were acting as mere spectators to the
massacre. They were right. Protest demonstrations are not enough to
stop a holocaust. Even less effective are sanctimonious statements by
the UN and EU equating one Israeli life to more than a hundred
Palestinian lives, which make the outright support for the massacre by
George W. Bush almost attractive in its honesty. So what can we do?
Debunking Myths
The first necessity is to debunk myths that have successfully been
used to vitiate all previous actions against Israel. Firstly, the myth
that the founding of the Zionist state has anything to do with the
Nazi genocide. In fact, the project was conceived decades before the
Nazi holocaust, and was a straightforward colonial agenda in which
European settlers would evict indigenous Third World people from their
land and take it over. Gandhi saw this very clearly, which is why he
refused to give the Zionists his support when they approached him,
despite his sympathy for persecuted Jews [2].
The second myth is that criticism of or opposition to the Zionist
state of Israel constitutes anti-Semitism, and is an attack on all
Jews. This is not true; indeed, Jews are among the most trenchant
critics not only of Israeli atrocities, but also of the whole idea of
a Zionist state. The notion that Judaism and Zionism are one and the
same is shared by anti-Semites and Zionists; the former assume that
all Jews are responsible for the crimes of the Zionists, while the
latter assume that all condemnation of Zionist crimes constitutes an
attack on Jews. These assumptions, equally reprehensible, are simply
two sides of the same coin.
The third myth is that there was ever a possibility of a two-state
solution. There were two models of settler-colonialism debated by the
Zionists. One model, supported by very few, was the South African one,
where the indigenous Palestinians, though evicted from their land and
herded into Bantustans, would be allowed to remain in the country. The
majority view was that the indigenous population should be eliminated,
like the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia. To this
end, massacres were carried out to terrorise the population into
leaving, a process then known as ’transfer of population’ and now as
’ethnic cleansing’, and ever since the Nuremburg trials considered to
be a crime against humanity [3]. Both sides saw Israel as swallowing
up the whole of Palestine, and one look at a map of Palestine/Israel
today shows that this has now been achieved, with the Apartheid wall
carving up the West Bank into ghettos, while the very fact that Israel
could blockade the Gaza strip so effectively shows that it, too, is
nothing more than a ghetto.
If Israel controls the non-contiguous borders, the coastal waters, the
ground water and air space of the proposed ’Palestinian state’, if the
people of Gaza can be starved and bombed simply because they exercised
their franchise to elect a government which the Israeli state did not
approve of, there could be no clearer proof that Palestinian
self-determination is not an option so long as the Zionist regime
remains. The struggle, therefore, is not for a separate Palestinian
state but, as in Apartheid South Africa, for one democratic state with
equal rights for all in the whole of historical Palestine. This would
solve the problem of the second-class status of Palestinian citizens
of Israel, the need for self-determination for Palestinians in the
territories occupied in 1967, and the right of return of Palestinian
refugees, all without driving Israeli Jews out of the country. It is
the only possible solution [4].
The fourth myth is that Israel attacks Palestinians in self-defence.
Take the most recent massacre, for example: it is claimed by Israel,
and repeated by other politicians and the media, that it was Hamas
which broke the ceasefire. Yet a careful scrutiny of ceasefire
violations shows that once Hamas defeated Fatah and took control of
the Gaza strip, violations from its side dropped almost to zero, until
Israel broke the ceasefire by an air attack and ground invasion on
November 4. Furthermore, throughout the ceasefire Israel implemented a
siege and naval blockade of Gaza, defined as acts of war in
international law. So it was Israel which broke the ceasefire in an
act of aggression, and the legally elected Hamas government of
Palestine which was acting in self-defence [5]. This means that in
international law, the murder of each one of the over 550 Palestinians
killed in the most recent massacre, whether the vast majority of
civilians or the small minority of guerrilla fighters, is a crime
equivalent to the crime of killing one Israeli civilian.
Indeed, even before the December onslaught, it was clear that what
Israel was doing in Gaza amounted to genocide according to the
Genocide Convention (1948), reiterated in the Rome Charter of the
International Criminal Court (2002), which includes: ’(c) Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part’ [6].
What Needs to be Done?
According to twenty-one human rights activists (including Jews) from
South Africa visiting the West Bank in July 2008, the situation in
Palestine/Israel was ’worse, worse, worse than everything we endured.
The level of the apartheid, the racism and the brutality, are worse
than the worst period of apartheid;’ ’What we went through was
terrible, terrible, terrible – and yet there is no comparison. Here it
is more terrible’ [7]. An international response at least as strong as
the response to Apartheid South Africa therefore seems to be
appropriate, and this is constituted by the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel called for by Palestinian
civil society groups on 9 July 2005, to be continued until the
apartheid regime is replaced by a democratic one. This includes
cultural, academic and sports boycotts, and a consumer boycott of
Israeli goods (barcode starting with 729), as well as a boycott of
companies investing in, sourcing from, or otherwise supporting Israel,
and pressure on them to change their policies. It would also include
pressure on governments to break off diplomatic, economic and military
ties with Israel, pointing out that these constitute complicity with
Israel’s crimes [8].
There should be extra pressure on openly collaborationist regimes,
like those of Mahmoud Abbas, Hosni Mubarak, and the Arab allies of
Israel, which ought to be made to feel that their people will reject
them unless they cease their complicity in Israeli crimes. Enormous
pressure would also have to be brought to bear on the US, which
assists Israel with billions of dollars annually as well as other
forms of support. Given the indications that no change in US policy
towards Palestine and Israel is planned by Barack Obama’s
administration, the pressure should begin immediately, before his
inauguration. And pressure from within the US should be augmented by
international pressure.
The US economy is in deep crisis, with more than $ 10 trillion of
national debt, and the only reason it can keep bankrolling Israel is
that the US dollar is treated as world currency and oil sales are
denominated in it, so the US has been getting more or less unlimited
credit from the rest of the world. Russia and the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC) countries must be pressurised into supporting the rights
of Palestinians by immediately denominating their oil sales in euro,
in preparation for moving to roubles in the case of Russia, and a
common Gulf currency in the case of the GCC countries. Countries like
China and Japan, with their massive US dollar reserves, should make
the extension of further credit conditional on the US ceasing to fund
Israel as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and countries with
smaller dollar reserves should shift their reserves to other
currencies. Such a move is required not only by ethical
considerations, but also by pragmatic ones: if the credit extended is
used to rebuild the US economy, there is a chance that it might be
returned, whereas if it is used to fund aggression against Palestine,
Iraq and Afghanistan, it will never be returned. In this campaign,
very little individual action is possible, and success would depend on
putting collective pressure on governments to boycott the US dollar
until the US ceases to engage in and support imperialist aggression.
With very few exceptions, governments of the world are complicit in
the atrocities being committed in Gaza, just as they were in the
crushing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising [9], and strong public
pressure would be needed to expose, condemn and end their complicity.
The myths enumerated above need to challenged in every forum, along
with the more diffuse racism that constitutes their premise. We may
disagree with the politics of Hamas, just as we may disagree with the
politics of the British Labour Party, but it does not follow that we
should condone the slaughter of all leaders and members of Hamas,
their families, government employees, and random members of the
Palestinian population which elected them to power, any more than we
would condone the slaughter of all leaders and members of the Labour
Party, their families, government employees, and random members of the
British population which elected them to power. The fact that the US
and EU cannot see this equivalence demonstrates that they are
dominated by the same racism which allowed slavery to flourish and the
indigenous peoples of North America and Australia to be exterminated.
Where Black people are killing Black people, as in Rwanda, or White
people are killing White people, as in Bosnia, there is a chance that
the UN may take action, however weak and belated. But where White
people are killing Third World peoples, as in Palestine, there is no
hope that it will take any action unless citizens of the world put
massive pressure on their governments to support a solution which can
bring justice and peace to Palestine/Israel. It is good that there
have been worldwide protests against the massacre of Palestinians in
Gaza, but a ceasefire would be no better than putting a sticking
plaster over a festering wound, which will only erupt again sooner or
later. The wound cannot heal until the infection has been eliminated
by replacing the Apartheid state with a democratic one, and long-term,
concerted action is required to achieve that