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| World Should Intervene To End
The Israeli Apartheid Hanan Ashrawi ZNet http://www.zmag.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html Sisters and Brothers, From Jerusalem, from the heart of
Palestine, a land besieged, and repeatedly violated by a most brutal
Israeli military occupation, I have come to join you today. From the midst
of the people of Palestine, a tortured nation, guilty only of an
unwavering commitment to freedom, dignity, and independence, I have come
to join you today. From the depths of unredeemed history, I have come to
join you today. I represent a narrative of exclusion, denial, racism, and
national victimization, but I also come with a message of hope,
redemption, and historical vindication embodied in the spirit and the will
of a people that has refused to succumb to all forces of oppression,
violence, cruelty, and injustice. In convening this conference, you are the
authentic embodiment of courage in withstanding the forces of domination,
subjugation, and enslavement. We stand together today to launch a truly
global mission of empowerment and solidarity, to give voice to the
"silenced," to give a reality to the "invisible," to
give recognition to the "denied," and to give credence to the
victimized. In times of adversity, and during the
darkest nights of the soul, we look to you for affirmation and action as
an antidote to the failure of established power systems, including
governments - a failure characterized by self-interest, power politics,
absence of will, and impotence. I take this opportunity to recognize
before you those valiant men and women who had left the comfort of their
homes in Europe and the US and joined us in Palestine to provide popular
protection, a "human shield" in the face of Israeli abuses,
violence, and violations against the Palestinian people. I come to you today with a heavy heart
leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing "Nakba"
[catastrophe], as the most intricate and pervasive expression of
persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and victimization. More than half a century ago [53 years],
the Palestinians as a people were slated for national obliteration, cast
outside the course of history, their identity denied, and their very human
cultural and historical reality suppressed. We became victims of the myth
of "a land without a people for people without a land" whereby
the West sought to assuage its guilt over its horrendous anti-Semitism by
the total victimization of a whole nation. Zionism sought to implement its
agenda of exclusivity by usurping not only the lands and rights of the
Palestinians, but also by confiscating their utterance and distorting
their historical narrative. In 1948, we became subject to a grave
historical injustice manifested in a dual victimization: on the one hand,
the injustice of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on
the population that has come to be known as the "refugee
question" that currently encompasses more than 5 million
Palestinians. On the other hand, those that remained were subject to the
systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed
them of all their rights and liberties including their national identity
on their own land. The creation of the state of Israel was no
heroic and legendary accomplishment as depicted by the version of history
propagated by the conquerors. It is time to lift the veil, to examine the
facts themselves, and to come to grips with the horrific price paid by an
innocent nation for the mere fact of its existence as well as for the
greed and moral blindness of others. The days of denial must come to an
end. The Palestinian people deserve their day in the sun as an equal among
nations, and as a tribute to the human will that cannot be broken. As a Palestinian, as a woman, and on behalf
of my people, I stand before you today to lay claim to my/to our humanity.
From the non-existent Palestinians ("there is not such thing as
Palestinians; they never existed" (Golda Meir, 1969) we have
undergone a metamorphosis willfully inflicted upon us by Israeli-imposed
diction and policies that have variously depicted us as "two-legged
vermin," "cockroaches," "beasts walking on two
legs," a people that have to be exterminated unless they are
"resigned to live as slaves," "grasshoppers to be
crushed," "crocodiles," and "vipers." [A
comprehensive list with representative samples is available] Such a systematic and racist dehumanization
was also accompanied by policies of violent expulsion. "There is no
other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries,
not one village, not one tribe should be left" (Joseph Weitz, 1940). "There is no choice: the Arabs must
make room for the Jews in Eretz Yisrael. If it was possible to transfer
the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian
Arabs" (Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1939). "Zionist colonization must either be
terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population.. It
is important to speak Hebrew, but it is even more important to be able to
shoot - or else I am through at playing with colonizing" (Vladimir
Jabotinsky, 1939). "We must do everything to insure they
never return. The old will die and the young will forget." However,
for those that remained in spite of all of Israel's military coercion and
attempts at forced expulsion, other (and equally sinister) plans were in
the making: "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of
woodcutters and waiters." (David Ben Gurion). To the rest of the world, we were reduced
to the Aristotelian dualism of pity and fear - the pitiful refugees, of
the fearful "terrorists." But never were we perceived or
addressed in the fullness of our humanity. The Palestinians today continue to be
subject to multiple forms and expressions of racism, exclusion,
oppression, colonialism, apartheid, and national denial. Our right to
self-determination, hence sovereignty and statehood, has been withheld by
force and made subject to the approval of our oppressor. The refugee
populations, mostly "stateless people," are bereft of the
rudimentary civil, human, political, and national rights, left at the
mercy of host countries that view them either as a demographic threat, or
as unwelcome guests. While Israel has legislated a "law of
return" to bring in Jews from all over the world into historical
Palestine, it persists in rejecting the Palestinian refugees' "Right
of Return" and in refusing to abide by UN res. 194, a legal
commitment which the international community was supposed to guarantee and
implement. The Palestinians who remained in what has
become Israel are experiencing in their historical homeland the worst
system of apartheid, exclusion, and racial discrimination--their towns and
cities either taken over entirely, or turned into ghettos and enclaves as
the "non-Jewish" population of Israel. Many continue to be
"displaced persons" in their own land, witnesses to the
destruction of their villages. Over 500 villages were razed in the
original ethnic cleansing campaign that accompanied the creation of the
state of Israel. Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967
have languished in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip under a
unique combination of military occupation, settler colonization, and
systematic oppression. Rarely has the human mind devised such
varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and
persecution. Since 1967, Palestinian land has been expropriated at an
increasing pace, while whole Jewish populations have been brought in, in a
calculated scheme of settler colonization. Throughout the land, an
artificial and colonial grid of infrastructure was superimposed on our
authentic reality to create a spurious settler superstructure as a means
of Israeli demographic, geographic, and extraterritorial incursions into
Palestine. So-called "bypass roads" for the
exclusive use of the illegal Jewish settler population, tear through the
heart of Palestinian land, to bypass Palestinian realities and create a
unique form of racism. In the meantime, settler vigilantes habitually
unleash the full force of their extremism and violence, carrying out
campaigns of terror against defenseless Palestinian families and villages.
Israel's state terrorism is implemented by both military and settler
perpetrators with political duplicity and legal impunity. Another unique manifestation of Israeli
racism is the blatant and sinister policy of "demographic
engineering." To maintain the "Jewish character," or the
"purity" of the state of Israel, the Palestinians have been
depicted and dealt with as a "demographic threat." Proposed
"remedies" included calls for forced birth control and
"population management," to "transfer" and expulsion
of whole communities, to the racist and punitive unilateral
"separation" scheme currently being advocated. In Jerusalem, land expropriation, ID
confiscations, home demolitions, withholding of building permits, and the
importation of settler colonies within and around the city have become
constant elements of Israel's demographic engineering through ethnic
cleansing. Jerusalem is also under siege in an attempt
to isolate it from its Palestinian context and environment, and to
extricate it from the heart of Palestine, as the center of political,
cultural, economic, social, and educational activity and as the future
capital of our state. Such Israeli unilateral measures seek to consolidate
Israel's illegal annexation of occupied Jerusalem, and to impose a Jewish
exclusivity on a Palestinian city that has always been pluralistic and
tolerant. Onslaughts on Christian and Islamic holy sites and activities
while banning Palestinian worshipers from reaching their holy places of
worship betray a willful policy of intolerance and a violation of the
right and freedom to worship. A state of siege has been imposed not only
on the West Bank and Gaza, but also within these territories, to transform
each village, town, and city into an isolated prison thereby destroying
every aspect of human life, including economic, educational, health, and
social cohesiveness in an attempt to sever every fiber of the fabric of
normal life. Israeli occupation troops using tanks, helicopter gunships,
F-16s, military barges, and checkpoints not only render a whole
Palestinian population captive in 64 isolated bantustans, they also use
the full force of their military power against a vulnerable and
defenseless people. Daily, they shell Palestinian homes, assassinate
Palestinian activists and leaders, destroy crops and fields, indulge in
cold-blooded murder of children and other innocents while implementing a
policy of deliberate humiliation and suffocation at every checkpoint. The Israeli occupation has also hijacked
the concept of "security" rendering it applicable only to
Israelis while depriving the Palestinians of every aspect of personal,
political, legal, territorial, historical, cultural, economic, and even
human security. As a blanket cover for its systematic abuses, Israel has
also abused the essence of the concept, exploiting it for the sake of
eradicating any mention of the occupation, and claiming the illogical
"right" to have a "secure" - or even a safe and
pleasant - military occupation that is in itself the very antithesis of
peace, security, and human rights. As the world watches, Israel has succeeded
in evolving and imposing another grand deception in the form of an
official spin that not only dehumanizes and demonizes the Palestinians,
but also as an attempt at "blaming the victim" and resuscitating
labels that represent us as subhuman species, and genetically violent
"terrorists," hence undeserving of any human treatment. At best,
a false symmetry is manufactured between occupier and occupied, oppressor
and oppressed, (as in the call on both sides to "stop the
violence") serving to eradicate the full horror of the occupation
while depriving the victims of their right to resist. Given the
disequilibrium of power, the American insistence on a "bilateral
solution" only serves to give Israel license to exploit the asymmetry
of power and to pursue its policies of subjugating a whole nation and
imposing a unilateral and unjust solution. The Israeli solution is firmly imbedded in
the tainted mentality of occupation as license to dictate by force of arms
illegal and punitive realities that would further exacerbate the conflict
and the suffering of the Palestinian people. Refusal to intervene by the
US and the international community as a whole has given Israel a free hand
to continue to act with impunity and immunity as a country above the law
and beyond accountability, while the Palestinians continue to be deprived
of protection of the law and the minimal imperatives of moral and human
decency. We continue to plead for a global rule of law that would check
the aggression of the powerful, and eliminate the ongoing dehumanization
of the Palestinian people. Such absence of will and abrogation of
responsibility on the part of the international community has not only
perpetuated the "Nakba" and prolonged the suffering and
victimization of the Palestinian people, but has also served to undermine
the quest and chances for peace throughout the region. When we joined the peace process launched
in Madrid in 1991, we did so as an act of will, as a commitment to a
peaceful resolution of the conflict with the aim of ending the occupation
of 22% of historical Palestine and the establishment of our independent
state on the territory occupied by Israel in 1967. As victims, we rose
above the pain of the moment and reached out to our occupiers to wrench
the course of history away from inevitable conflict, towards
reconciliation based on justice and parity. Buttressed by the confidence
of the people's will to endure and resist oppression, as manifested in the
intifada of 1987, we offered Israel and the world a unique opportunity to
legitimize a daring pursuit of peace, and to gain a constituency for an
equitable resolution. Unfortunately, the peace process became a
punitive process manipulated by Israel to pursue its policies of
expansion, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, and subjugation of the weaker
side by force. It further served as a guise to rationalize the separation
of the people from the land and to fragment both the people and the land,
transforming the occupied Palestinian territories into a series of
isolated reservations or Bantustans while maintaining full Israeli
hegemony and direct control. While seeking to bestow retroactive
legitimacy on illegal Israeli settlements, and on Israel's annexation of
Jerusalem by force, it also sought to negate the Palestinian refugees'
right of return thereby denying the very essence of peace and destroying
its foundations. The so-called "generous offer" of
Barak has been exposed for the sham that it is - an occupier's version of
"what's good for the natives," based only on "what's good
for Israel," thus ensuring further conflict and instability rather
than cementing a fair and durable solution. Having been historically the
victims of war and conflict, we found ourselves the victims of a flawed
and unjust peace process. Sharon's incursion into the Haram Al-Sharif
on September 28, 2000, was only the calculated spark that ignited a powder
keg already in place as a result of the inequities of the process itself.
The use of live ammunition and "lethal force" against the
unarmed Palestinian protestors unleashed horrific forces of hostility,
racism, and orchestrated violence against the captive Palestinian people.
The continued intensification of these measures sends an ominous and stark
message of brutality and is symptomatic of the regression to
fundamentalist Zionism witnessed in the bloodbaths of the 1940's. By
claiming that "this is the continuation of Israel's War of
Independence," Sharon is sending a message to the Palestinian people
and to the whole world that the national eradication and the ethnic
cleansing of the 1948 "Nakba" are still in process. The current Israeli government represents
the most lethal combination of extremist right-wing political ideology,
religious fundamentalism and zealotry, and unbridled forces of militarism
with a deceptive veneer of "the civilized face" of the Labor
party. Sharon is the same army general who had committed crimes against
humanity in such atrocities as the Qibya massacre of 1953, the
"cleansing of Gaza" in 1973, the invasion of Lebanon and the
massacres of Sabra and Shatilla of 1982. Intent on pursuing this bloody
path and on repeating the mistakes of history, Sharon has not learned that
no amount of brutality, cruelty, or violence can break the will of a
people determined to gain its freedom, dignity, and independence. He shows
no signs of drawing the right historical conclusions that colonialism is
by nature a temporary form of enslavement, and that a people colonized
cannot be brought to their knees by the colonizer's stifling measures of
subjugation and containment. Sisters and brothers, I appeal to you
today, to restore the absent Palestinians to the agenda of humanity, to
validate our reality and rights, to recognize and alleviate the pain and
suffering of this tortured nation, and to give recognition to the
Palestinian narrative long denied. You are the only source of empowerment
for a people who feel abandoned and disempowered, but who have never lost
faith in human solidarity and a shared vision of emancipation. I appeal to you, as I have often done to
governments and global fora, not to adopt the stance of "cowardly
neutrality," for in the struggle against oppression, injustice,
racism, intolerance, colonialism, and exclusion, there can be NO
neutrality. We are all called upon to take sides on behalf of the victim,
the disenfranchised, and the oppressed, and to stem the tide of evil and
prevent the forces of darkness from prevailing. Here, there is no US veto
to deprive us of protection and our rights, nor is there censorship or
blackmail to intimidate governments ruled by self-interest. Let this meeting radiate the pure light of
the human spirit that can never be dimmed or contained. Our path to the
future must be based on the redemption of history and the past, free of
the shackles of inherited inequities. Our legacy to the future must be
based on the rectification of the painful legacies of the past. Sisters and brothers, never before has an
occupation army imposed such a total and suffocating siege on a captive
civilian population, then proceeded to shell their homes, bomb their
infrastructure, assassinate their activists and leaders, destroy their
crops and trees, murder their civilians at will, steal their lands, and
then demand that they acquiesce like lambs to the slaughter. Never before
have the victims been denied the right to articulate, and gain recognition
for, the horrendous atrocities being committed against them as a matter of
policy, but were rather blamed and punished for the fact of their
victimization. The oft-repeated dictum that "Israel
will not negotiate under fire" applies only to Palestinian
"fire" or attempts at self-defense. While Israel must be left
unhampered in its fire-shell-assassinate at will policy, the Palestinians
must maintain "zero violence" leading to a "cooling off
period" that would prepare the way for "confidence-building
measures" and ultimately award the Palestinians the coveted
"prize" of resuming negotiations with their occupiers. On behalf of the Palestinian people I
appeal to you to have the courage to intervene, to ensure that the
oppressor is held accountable and the victim is protected, to enact those
principles and values that not only protect lives but that also imbue life
with the human qualities that make it worth living. Despite our
overwhelming pain, we have not surrendered to the forces of occupation,
colonization, racism, and dehumanization - nor have we adopted their moral
distortions. I ask you also not to succumb, but to maintain and enhance
the struggle for dignity, equality, freedom, and justice as an act of
collective affirmation on behalf of humanity as a whole. |