Many people reacted strongly with disapprobation to my "Hamas attack was wrong" post yesterday. Nearly everyone agrees that murdering civilians is wrong, but some question whether the settlers are civilians in the first place. The settlers are racial supremacists whose race pride, irrational hatred and extermination fantasies combine to make Palestinian lives unlivable. They carry guns and are simultaneously the driving force behind and justification for the occupation.
Others, my father among them, asked how I could assert that the time for armed struggle is over.
We correctly insist that Israel contravenes international law by transferring civilians onto occupied land. Nothing has changed. Israel continues to contravene international law in that way. But reasonable people can still disagree about whether the settlers are civilians. I still insist that they are. And murdering civilians is wrong.
The more controversial claim is that the time for armed struggle is over. How can I possibly say that when the settlements continue to grow, Zionists are racially purging Palestinians from Jerusalem and pauperizing and suffocating them in Gaza? How much of this are Palestinians supposed to tolerate?
It’s a very easy question to answer, but only because I believe in some basic assumptions:
1 There will never be a Palestinian state
2 The settlements will not, under any circumstances, cease to grow or be established
3 The Israelis will continue to racially purge Jerusalem
4 Palestinian guns cannot prevent any of this from happening
And finally,
5 Our superior morality – which is accessible to everyone, including erstwhile Zionists – is the key to undoing the Zionist state and creating a country where Palestinians and Jewish people can live equally.
We must accept that Zionist aggression will continue. Furthermore, guns will not repel or defeat the irrational Zionist hatred of Palestinians and other non-Jews in Palestine/Israel. But that does not mean we are powerless to rid ourselves of Zionism?
The only way to undo the Zionist state – which is my unambiguous goal –is by insisting on our right to vote. I believe strongly that the Palestinian struggle is not about independence; I don’t want a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, the Palestinian struggle is now about equal rights in the entire state of Palestine/Israel. Those of us who are refugees want the entire country back.
We are all angry. But allowing our anger to override and overwhelm our long-term, humanist vision for Palestine/Israel – many of us profess to believe in the one-state solution, after all – is an excellent way to confound ourselves.
It’s often repeated that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. But we are not weak.
Our moral right – the righteousness of our cause – suffuses us with a strength which will overwhelm Zionism. All the guns in the world can’t accomplish what we will if we don’t lose focus and succumb to unworthy sentiments. It’s time to put the guns away.
Dream on, Ahmed.
One Person, One Vote.
Argue about everything else inside the Knesset.
There must be a Palestinian state, or eventually there will be no Palestine and no Palestinians, if current trends continue.
In a single state, unless you are proposing a segregated one in which Jews are not permitted to purchase land in large and critical areas, the Judaization of Jerusalem for example will increase beyond currently, as there will be NO possible institutional or political prohibition.
And, although I dislike many of the ways that Israel behaves, I love that there was and is an Israel that is a haven to Jews in the world. My feeling about this is a relatively weak sentiment. Many others obviously feel much much more strongly about that.
richard quote :”There must be a Palestinian state, or eventually there will be no Palestine and no Palestinians, if current trends continue.”
and who would be the cause of that other then the zionist movement which you regularly support richard?
richard quote “I love that there was and is an Israel that is a haven to Jews in the world. ”
do you love it at the cost of a loss for a safe haven for palestinians? it appears so… your position is racist and their is nothing high minded about it..
do you plan on moving to this ”haven”? if not, why not? the way things are going, israel will continue to act like a plague on the planet as all of it’s pretensions of democracy and wanting to find peace are seen for the facade they are.. your words here are no different as i see it…
The Judaization of Jerusalem in the long run doesn’t matter in a single state because those segregated neighborhoods we call settlements would be integrated under the law. Think of it as the end of redlining. Israel is a haven to Jews in the world, but how does their plight compare to current Palestinian refugees living in ghettos in Lebanon? Who is more in need of a haven? If the haven only applies to Jews but not the owners of the land themselves, than it’s just racism.
That can happen in a two-state solution as well, and should in both Israel and Palestine.
What you’re suggesting, Witty, is basically a legalization of Israeli land theft.
Probably there won’t be. Thanks to your sort of Zionist.
“There must be a Palestinian state, or eventually there will be no Palestine and no Palestinians, if current trends continue.”
It would be helpful if you could explain the meaning of this passage. Current demographic trends show an increase in the Palestinian population in Palestine. Are you suggesting then that Israel would resort to expelling the Palestinians? Please clarify.
Simple. He means that Israelis will kill and kill and kill until there are no Palestinians left.
Oh he won’t say that, but that’s always what Zionists are saying when it comes to “peace negotiations” —
“This is the best deal you’re going to get. Take it, or else.”
I see that as possible if co-existence in two states is not sought.
Many on both sides desire that the “other” just not exist, or live elsewhere.
Israel may well kill thousands of Palestinians, but that will not reverse demongraphic trends. To do that would require killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. To my mind, this is an implausible scenario – far too many people are watching.
I just don’t see much to support the notion that “There must be a Palestinian state, or eventually there will be no Palestine and no Palestinians, if current trends continue.”
What seems more probable is Israel vacating pockets of the West Bank thus creating a set of small, tightly controlled Palestinian enclaves – in effect, a series of open-air prisons, like Gaza. Agha and Malley allude to this scenario in their WaPo article (link to washingtonpost.com
I’m sure they’ll be making as much use of Israeli Military Order 1650, under which all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, even native born, are “infiltrators” who can be removed at the whim of their oppressors:
link to palestinechronicle.com
No Palestine and no Palestinians? Do you mean that the whole land will sink beneath the sea and everyone will be drowned?
Or do you mean that there will be no state called Palestine, and the people now called Palestinians will be called Israelis instead?
If the latter, so what? The important thing is for them to be allowed to live in their land with full and equal human rights and opportunities.
Richard Witty, I think I probably speak for many here when I ask that you please, please pack up and go to your haven, where you can cavort with your ethnic similas and religious blood brothers and sisters to your heart’s content. Not only that, but over there – in the haven – you’ll find your heaven – a place where you can be one of the few chosen true leftists-humanists. It’ll be a bit lonely, to be sure, but you can always come back here – to your favorite blog where to pour out your heart about the way you feel persecuted for NOT being a maximalist. We will, a always, sympathize.
>> There must be a Palestinian state, or eventually there will be no Palestine and no Palestinians, if current trends continue.
How do you figure? There was no Israelite Kingdom (a.k.a. “Jewlandia”) for centuries upon centuries, but apparently that did not stop Jews from continuing to exist as “a nation”. If there is no Palestinian state, Palestinians need only bide their time and remain “generation to generation” fear-scarred until some kind benefactor nation carves a haven for them out of their ancestral homeland, thereby permitting the Palestinians to finally self-(self-)determine themselves.
To start playing around with word games about settlers being soldiers, ex-soldiers, potential soldiers or any other description of an armed person will not justify having killed these people. In the old days, suicide bombers used to justify killing people on buses by saying that all Israelis are reservists and could be called up any time and therefore legitimate military targets, but these too were word games to justify something not very moral, as you mentioned yesterday, Ahmed.
Israelis play these word games about terrorists and pseudo-terrorists to get away with the evil they are doing but Palestinians shouldn’t be copying them. The evils that the settlers are committing is one story that has to be addressed and the killing of 4 civilians is another. There are thousands of Israeli soldiers all over the WB that could have been attacked but targeting 4 civilians was a cowardly act.
I would say that, whatever Hamas’s purpose in carrying out the attacks, it could have equally been served by attacking soldiers or police.
Nonetheless it’s impossible to forget that these “civilians” trot arround carrying military assault weapons in public, that the settlements were originally intended as military outposts against some imaginary aggression from hostile Arab states, that their presence has always been defended, both by themselves and by Israel, as a “security” measure.
The settlers are not civilians in the normal sense of the term.
Let’s clarify the claim about word games and look at the facts. Many settlers are currently doing their three-year national service in the IDF ergo they are soldiers. Many other settlers do a month’s reserve duties in the IDF when they have completed their compulsory three-year service until the age of 40. They too are soldiers then. In between those periods they are heavily armed and use their weapons against Palestinian civilians. Some are even in the IDF reserves after the age of 40.
Please expand on how a militarily trained and IDF armed settler who has served/is serving/continues to serve in the IDF and carries weapons most of the time and doesn’t hesitate to use these weapons is less of a legitimate military target than a non-settler IDF enlisted soldier.
Miss Dee Mena, if every single settler on the WB fit the militarized description you gave, I’d go along with you and declare open season on settlers but until then, we have to give 4 civilians driving in a car with no military markings on it the benefit of the doubt and not condemn them to a death by assassination. This is something Israelis do with impunity and they give it fancy names like “targeted assassinations” or “collateral damage” like some piece of furniture. This should not be the way of Palestinians; it only helps Israelis with their victimhood schtick.
Do US Military veterans and their kids carry M-16s on the Arizona public streets, and sometimes shoot at other locals while the cops look on?
Schumer helped promote and pass the the Federal government’s assault weapons ban, which outlawed the sale to the American people of 19 types of semiautomatic weapons, many of which are possessed by Israeli settlers. Schumer has stated, “I have made it (gun control) one of my life’s works…”
Only if they look Mexican.
I’ve already stated that settler women and children don’t fit into the category of legitimate armed targets. They bear responsibility for the occupation in other ways. However, most of the men are armed and just because they drive with their weapons in an unmarked civilian vehicle doesn’t change this fact.
Again, I don’t think Hamas’ move was smart politically speaking but I think targeting armed male settlers is legitimate for reasons I have already outlined in several posts. And I do agree with you from a political perspective that the Israelis are milking this move for all they’re worth politically.
Miss Dee Mena, Israelis are as venomous as the settlers, if not more but they have been drawing our attention to the settlers as being the bad guys and they do it to whitewash their own crimes. They planted the settlers on the WB and in Jerusalem in rows like carrots to create facts on the ground to protect their own asses inside Israel. They provided them with financial incentives, free land, paved private roads and gave them military protection. Inside Israel, they never refused water that was being stolen from Palestinians or complained about Israel opening open air garbage dumps next to Palestinian villages on the WB or relocating their polluting industrial plants there. But now, these “good” Israelis would want you to believe that the settlers are the bad ones. That’s all BS and I don’t believe any of their new found sympathy for the Palestinians. The cancer originates from within Israel, not from the settlements; these guys are just the pawns and Israelis are ready to flush some of them down the drain for the welfare of the Israeli collectivty as they did in Gaza in 2005. You saw the poll about two-thirds of Israelis favouring the restart of settlements constructions and you remember that the majority of Israelis were enjoying the phosphorus show over Gaza. It’s wrong to be concentrating only on the settlers.
Walid,
You have misunderstood the relationship between the majority of Israelis and the settler minority, and the history of that relationship.
The settlers, and broadly speaking the community of Orthodox Jews with knitted kippas, did an amazing job of exploiting the weaknesses of the Israeli political system to entrench themselves and divert resources. At a certain point, when the beast was large enough, they could extract resources from a wide variety of pots of money and privileges under state control.
This group, which spearheaded the migration of Israelis across the Green Line, does not however represent all settlers, or all Israelis.
“…they have been drawing our attention to the settlers as being the bad guys and they do it to whitewash their own crimes. ”
That’s conspiracy thinking for you. Without a shred of evidence. Who are ‘they’? What source for their motives?
The effort to portray Israeli society as monolithic is an effort to justify, explain and contextualize crimes against Israeli civilians.
That said, the ‘cancer’ does emerge from within Israel. The religious Zionists suffered until 1967 from being ‘junior partners’ in the praxis of Zionism. After the occupation began, some young leaders rebelled against the older generation (Avram Burg’s father, for example) and staked out a claim for a special mission in the ‘whole land of Israel.’
The Labor establishment of the day was split over this new breed of religious Zionist, and certainly didn’t ‘send’ anyone anywhere. This changed only after 1977 when the Likud came to power, and extended the settler project to include ‘regular’ Israelis with financial inducements.
A good source is Gershon Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire, though others cover this territory as well.
link to amazon.com
clenchner, it’s not a conspiracy theory and you are displaying some of it of yourself. Your way of letting the Israelis off the hook by blaming the rabid orthodox settlements Jews is reminding me of what happened in Germany when a whole country enthusiatically marched behind a madman and after the war, the story changed to reflect that it was only a few genocidal maniacs that did and the rest were innocently taken up in the surge. Blame it on the Likud if you want but at the end of the day, with every half glass of stolen water a good or bad Israeli is drinking and with every half shower of stolen Palestinian water an Israeli is taking and in all communities where a good or bad Israeli is living that has been built on the ruins of a destroyed Palestinian village, this Israeli individual irrespective of whether or not he has Likiud stripes tattooed on his back is party to the crime committed and continues being committed against the Palestinian people; those settlers are on the West Bank by the grace of the people within Israel that are party to the theft as much as the settlers themselves. Therein lies your evidence.
Walid the Israeli government is heavily responsible for sponsoring, financing and arming the settlers. But it’s very hard to shoot members of the Israeli government. However, the settlers are the ones causing the most mayhem in the West Bank not the Israeli population in general. They are the ones killing, stealing and plundering. The whole argument was about whether those settlers trained, financed and armed by the IDF are as legitimate a target as are IDF soldiers. I maintain they are as outlined in previous posts.
However, I do think Palestinians’ right to fight the settlers is not furthering the cause at present but that does not negate from the legitimacy of the armed struggle.
Miss Dee Mena, the government is the reflection of the people that put it there. Netanyahu, Lieberman and Eli Yishai were not voted into office by Palestinian-Israelis but by Jewish-Israelis. Those people that put on the phosphorus show over Gaza were Israelis and the poll we read about yesterday about the majority of Israelis in favour of continued settlement construction had nothing to do with the govgernment and neither were the majority of Israelis that were rejoicing over the war on Gaza nor those other ones that condemned the Goldstone Report. Blaming only the settlers is letting the real criminals off the hook and too easily. I agree about the armed struggle continuing but not as it concerns attacking civilians.
Your logic will get the Palestinians thrown out of the West Bank by parallel logic.
“They are not really civilians”.
Settlers are civilians, even if their title to land is questionable, even if their presence drives you crazy.
When civilians act unlawfully to other civilians, then that is criminal activity, to be tried by an impartial (non-political) jury. And, thats as far as justice can be rationalized to punishment.
“They are justifiable targets” is fascism, racism.
Walid we appear to be going around in circles here as well as being stuck on repeat. Nobody was talking about attacking civilians but armed settlers and IDF personnel. And again a large portion of Israelis are against the settlements and are willing to give them up. They are not as fanatical as the settlers.
The difference between the two of us is I’m not presenting some simplistic theory that lays the blame squarely in one exact place – not the Likud and not the entire Israeli people.
Some factions of modern Orthodoxy waged a political battle for the settling the land of Israel. They had both opposition and support from other sectors of Israeli society. In 1977 (and not before) they were able to begin shifting large scale resources for their effort.
To look at levels of state support in the 80s or 90s and retroactively assume that this was the intention all along of Labor governments before 1977 is a-historical.
The story is complicated, with differences between support for settlement in the Jordan Valley vs. Hebron, Sinai vs. the Golan, etc. The conclusion that what we have today is exactly what was intended – would you argue that is true for the Palestinian side as well? Should we argue that Arafat and the entire Palestinian people had the result of today as an intention all along – just because in 1993 he was in favor of Oslo and enjoyed majority support?
We live in a world where people don’t get what they want, and certainly not states or entire societies. That’s true for Palestinians and Israelis. To suggest otherwise is to feed the myth of Israeli exceptionalism.
the moment they entered occupied territory with the intent to settle so it could be annexed they ceased being civilians and became military assets. that being said killing should always be avoided whenever possible though I fail to see how a peaceful solution exists. the only real solution is an outside invasion of Israel from Europe and the states.
Ahmed: Thanks ago for your clarity and courage. I think you’ve converted me to the 1-state solution; until now, I’ve still hung on to 2-states although with extreme reluctance, for all the obvious reasons.
1-state is nowhere near reality, and will unfortunately take many years to achieve. But your points 1-5 prove to me that 2-states has become impossible, and I never thought it was entirely ethical anyway.
Please keep writing and posting.
ditto.. thanks james.
Whereas I and the majority of progressives regard Israeli self-determination as an expression of self-governance, rather than imposed.
If Palestinian self-governance can emerge, then it will preserve a better norm than the fantasy of a single state.
I appreciate that you are approaching the single-state concept as civil and not as Palestinian nationalist as many do. That some solidarity periodically speak of throwing the Israelis out, “after” the democratic state, (and you personally also don’t contest those statements here) is scary and conflicts with your stated morality.
Got that, kids? Israeli Jews MUST have their own government; Palestinans MAY have their own government — if they’re nice. Oh, and let Israel park their troops on their lawns. And hand over access to water on their property. And renounce all legitimate claims to land stolen by ethnic cleansing in 1948. And 1967. And pretty much right up to this minute. And ongoing.
‘The only way to undo the Zionist state – which is my unambiguous goal –is by insisting on our right to vote.’
You might want to add a sixth plank to the platform — paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall:
‘Mr. Netanyahu, open this gate. Mr. Netanyahu, tear down this wall!’
Israeli Palestinians and West Bank Palestinians are separated by the wall, just as surely as East and West Germans were.
Obama’s silly peace talks should be replaced with reunification talks. Turn Israel’s undefined borders against it — there are no borders. Palestine is, and ever was, one state.
The interesting question to me is whether settlers are considered “civilians” in the conventional sense, and, if so, are they entitled to the protections accorded to civilians in an armed conflict? If not, then are they legitimate targets? It seems to me that they fall somewhere between “civilians” and “combatants.” At the very least, individuals who knowingly and forcibly live on land belonging to others (not to mention the other violent crimes committed by settlers and the myriad other ways in which they cause suffering on Palestinians) — these people do not seem to be entitled to live in complete security on stolen land.
A corollary to all this is that we should start referring to Israel as a racist state that extends from the river and the sea, and that denies full political rights to all of its Palestinian citizens, and all political rights to most of these Palestinian citizens. “Racist state” is better in this regard than “Apartheid state,” which takes us off into a discussion of South Africa, as if Palestinian rights aren’t visible unless they’re compared. No, our enemy is the racist state of Israel, and its practice of Jewish supremacism.
Great post. I’ve got nothing to add, just wanted to say that.
- “disapprobation” is a strong word. People were not disagreeing with you about the criminal nature of the act, but rather how it would be used to further certain interests – this is an entirely different thing.
Ask General James N. Mattis (US CentCom commander). The simple fact is that those who have the firepower will continue to use it, so it is a banal statement of fact that armed struggle will continue as long as the money is funneled into it. Do the Israelis give the Palestinians any choice in the matter? This is the question you must ask.
- democracy is not just universal suffrage. Vote for what? Americans vote every 4 years – this does not keep the fabric of the US from unraveling.
This is rhetorical. Make no mistake, it’s primarily the weapon of the strong, you know this.
I have no answers for you Ahmed, but in a certain sense, you are saying that the higher moral ground will ultimately prevail by virtue of it being the higher moral ground, and that the world community will eventually come around to realizing this – this is not an absolute certainty. The state of Israel has been confiscating territory for decades – is it because it has consistently taken the moral high ground that it has succeeded in taking territory? Of course not. It has been because of its possession of superior firepower and intimidation.
It is good to want peace, but the conditions that violent states impose do not offer this as an option, unfortunately. Simply put, “it’s my way or the highway”. The only hope is that the world community put pressure on the US and Israel.
I think that in the grand scheme of things you are right, Ahmed Moor.
The only way to curb Israel’s violence or bring about an end to the occupation will — in the long run — have to be the continued direct actions of activists like those on board the Mavi Marmara, or those on board the Rachel Corrie.
Even Hamas’ spokesperson admitted several months ago that 10,000 rockets could not have achieved what one single flotilla did for Gaza and the Palestinians.
In fact, the more I think about this, the more doubtful I am that either Fatah or Hamas carried out the attack on the colonists in Hebron the other day. I suppose we’ll never know for sure, though.
In the first half dozen years of its existence, Hamas was secretly supported by Israel. They most certainly wanted them to succeed as a political force. I have always wondered how many sleepers they left behind inside Hamas after its founding.
The only beneficiary from this latest act of violence is Israel itself — they need a continuous supply of martyrs to feed into American press to continue popular support for Israel. It was quite clear during the second intifada, that whenever there was a decline in the number of suicide bombings, Sharon would pull of some particularly provocative act to stimulate more suicide attacks. Those 800 or so dead Israelis were a small price to pay for a full decade of unquestioning US support.
Avi, I share your suspicions. Something doesn’t smell right here. So when will Israel catch the perpetrators? or have they caught them yet?
RW:I love that there was and is an Israel that is a haven to Jews in the world.
You place yourself on a continuum where this argument has validity. I think it has none.
When has Israel or Zionism offered a safe haven for Jews in danger? Israel dismantled most of the world’s oldest Jewish communities in order to create Israel from the pieces.
How does Israel fulfil that function today? Israel is the most dangerous place for Jews to live today.
In what future scenario would Israel be a safe haven for non-Israeli Jews? The U.S. guarantees Israel’s existence. The U.S. is the most Jewish-friendly society the world has seen. If, in some nightmare scenario, the U.S. turned on its Jews, how long would Israel last?
Israel is known as a safe haven for fugitive, Jewish scoundrels, a source of danger to its own Jews, and threatens to endanger Jews worldwide.
My in-laws required that haven in 1949, after they were harrassed in Hungary, and no other country would accept them.
It was not a safe haven then either.
Jewish self-determination is an expression of progressive principles, as Palestinian self-determination is.
Its literally up to the populace to determine their governance, not external movements.
And what did your relatives do, once they had brown-skinned neighbors? Why, they did what every European colonist does! They opened fire with guns, shot any survivors who dared to come back, bulldozed the house next store and gave themselves a bigger lawn.
Yet again I will point out what nonsense this talk of “Jewish self-determination” is.
If the “right of self-determination” means the right of a group to set up a state in a particular territory, that right is only a right of the residents of that territory, and not of any others. Jews as a group are not residents of a single territory, so the right cannot be applied to Jews as a whole.
Also, claiming such a right for Jews leads to bizarre consequences. If Australian citizens have the right of self-determination, and exercise it to maintain the Commonwealth of Australia, then Australian Jews will have that right.
But Australian Jews, born in Australia, and holding no other citizenship, will also have the right of self-determination as Jews. Yet other Australians will not have any extra right of self-determination. Why this inequity?
Its literally up to the populace to determine their governance, not external movements.
Witty! Are you recommending a stop to the imposition of unpopular figures to lead the Palestinian Authority instead of the ones elected by, you know, the Palestinian populace?
Witty, please elaborate — why did your in-law have to leave in 1949? part of my family came from Hungary as well – around that time, and the story is quite complicated. Another part left Hungary in ’56 for reasons that are well known, and they found refuge in austria, where they thrived – far better, in fact, than the branch who went to Israel.
You do know that the communists who came to power there were not strictly after the Jews, but after elites of all sorts, especially liberal ones, right? Chances are, that your in-laws left because they were able to – by claiming jewish descent. Others were quite stuck there for a very long time.
I think it would be accurate to say that the settlers themselves “hide behind civilians” (the family members they use as placeholders in their land theft) or with regard to their clearly paramilitary wing, “hide behind the pretense of being civilians.”
That Israel’s going all out to oppose BDS tells us that nonviolence is the way to go. Yes, there could be martyrs, but far, far fewer than if violence were used. Palestinians to lead, of course, but truly invincible now, what with all of humanity now on their side, testimony indeed to the power & effectiveness of that spirit of liberation, the all for one and one for all.
Oy! Oy! Oy! Four Israelis killed by Hamas gunmen!
This is widely broadcast in the world media and is a major hasbara talking point in all Talkbacks (see The NYT, Guardian CIF, Haaretz, etc, etc) but not a word or a whisper about recent killings of Palestinians by the Israelis:
According to B’Tselem: from 19 Jan. 2009 to 31 July 2010 – 100 Palestinians killed, seven Israelis killed (including the recent four).
Can anyone even a mention of B’Tselem in the Western MSM?
I’m trying to address the question of whether armed settlers form a civil population. In my view they do not. Of course this is only a restricted part of the whole question of whether attacks on settlers are morally permissible, but it’s important not to be mistaken about it.
The whole spirit and every letter known to me of the idea of Just War, which is the mother of the various attempts at formulating international law, is that justice depends on confining armed conflict to identified armed forces operating under the control of a genuine civil sovereign operating in reasonable self-defence. Part of the idea is that these forces will be subject to a code of military discipline and its members punished for violations of it.
The idea of sending into disputed territory – or beyond generally recognised international borders – a group of people whose aim, purpose and activity is directed to controlling, intimidating or displacing the previously existing population and who are armed but not formally members of the armed forces, therefore not subject to the discipline which is essential to the legitimacy of armed forces, is an idea that is atrocious through and through. The government or power that acts on this idea is refusing to operate on the basic terms of justice in war, since it has torn up the fundamental rule that it is through armed forces that armed conflicts are conducted. It is nonsensical to tear up a rule and then to demand that the same rule be observed by the other side. The people who put this idea into effect on the ground are engaged in an irregular, forbidden use or show of force – ‘francs-tireurs’. They aren’t more like a civil population than an army, they are less like a civil population than an army, therefore are less protected by moral restrictions even than soldiers in uniform are.
Those of us who say that the settlers are not a civil population are not engaging in word games but in substantial argument, I would claim.
I can see that the Israelis might for their part claim that not they but the Palestinians have created a chaos without law – a Hobbesian state of nature – and that Israel is trying to create security, an aim which justifies actions that would otherwise be forbidden. They might claim that the Palestinian terrorists were the first francs-tireurs on the scene – and so on. They might also claim that armed members of the male sex are one thing, women (even armed women, should they ever become part of the story) quite another, since women have a sacredness recognised by all humanity. These arguments may be valid – I’m only saying that an attack on settlers, defined as an armed group serving a political purpose beyond recognised international borders, is not an attack on a standard part of civil society.
Good piece, Ahmed. I think you are right. The fiction that there can be a viable, independent Palestine, free from Israeli interference is one that suits Israel very well – allowing them to continue building, dispossessing and corralling while the mirage is always in the indeterminate future. More importantly it allows Israel to pretend that the Palestinians are not its responsibility, that they are a separate people not under Israeli rule and that their citizenship is of a future non-existent state. Meanwhile they are conveniently defenceless, without any rights, and obliged to live under Israeli military law – in other words they have been the victims twice over – of land and property theft, as well as all normal human rights. The ‘Palestinian state’ of the future is a fiction which allows Israel total and absolute control of a population which it despises and is determined to eradicate as a political, social and cultural entity. The only Palestinian ‘state’ Israel has in mind is one of stunted enclaves, ghettos cut off from the outside world and controlled by the IDF. Hebron is a classic example.
Therefore you are right – the only option for Palestinians is full and equal rights to Jews – a basic and undeniable right for any humans living under a state machine like Israel. Israel pretends its borders are to be determined, which is another lie – look at where its border posts and lines are – off the coast of Gaza to the Allenby Bridge. In between is de facto, and as far as they are concerned, Israel. They consider it all theirs, yet keep a convenient fiction that Palestinians live somewhere else – in a void, a non-state, and one which they will keep them in, until the give up and move away. Comparisons are made with apartheid – this is far worse, and more pernicious – more ugly, brutal, violent and utterly inhumane. That is the message that activists and Palestinians need to get out. I wish you luck.
Thanks much Ahmed for this essay…Its clarity is really useful.
Clenchner: The settlers, and broadly speaking the community of Orthodox Jews with knitted kippas, did an amazing job of exploiting the weaknesses of the Israeli political system to entrench themselves and divert resources.
Israeli settlers come in all shapes and sizes: from the black-hats of Emanuel to the secular in Ma’aleh Adumim. From settlements of police and military brass to (staunchly secular) Russian emigrees at Nokdim. From American expats in Efrat to business types everywhere.
There was no need to manipulate the system to “divert resources”. They were granted, and continue to be granted, by the government. The government has had a consistent policy of offering premium tax breaks, mortgage incentives, free infrastructure for new settlements and free security (provided by the boys serving their national military service).
The Labor establishment of the day was split over this new breed of religious Zionist, and certainly didn’t ’send’ anyone anywhere.
Yigal Allon, Shimon Peres and Yizhak Rabin went through the motions of resisting the settlers but signed off on the first settlements of Sebastaya and Hebron before the Labor Zionists lost power to Begin’s Likud. Read Idit Zertal’s Lords of the Land. The leaders of the Labor party admitted that the settlers had seized the mantle of Zionist pioneers from the Labor Zionists. Peres et al annointed those first settlers as the paragons of Zionism and the Israeli establishment has repeatedly confirmed that judgement. The Israeli public has repeatedly endorsed their leaders at the polls.
Nobody hoodwinked anyone. Stop making excuses.
100% in agreement. As always, Ahmed is a voice of impeccable reason and humanity.
Moor,
While I agree that the killings were reprehensible and avoidable, I am not sure if the victims of this incident should be written away as innocents in the way of civilians.
The settlers are people who, if not personally involved in the razing and expulsion of the Palestinian land which they occupy, are complicit in the enterprise by benefiting from the stolen resources and land with military impunity. And, lest you forget, they often display a sadistic streak of violence and hate crimes against the Palestinians they have wronged. How do you qualify criminal colonialists as civilians? Even if the settlers were unarmed at the time, does that excuse their physical engagement in a movement that has left Palestinians without their homes, businesses and families?
To put things in context, consider that Palestinians are regularly shot in their homes, villages and streets, or even Gazan civilians and farmers murdered WITHIN their borders as shot at by the occupying IDF treating the whole area as their shooting gallery. That does not mean that this episode of Hamas violence cannot be denounced or is acceptable, but one need not legitimize the Zionist settler movement in the process as well by calling settlers “civilians.”
In regards to your general idea of promoting Palestinian Gandhism (which I interpret as your M.O.), I have two points to make:
1) You are overplaying the significance and lessons of this incident, falling into the hands of Western politicians who blind themselves to their own widespread policies of violence, yet promote a smaller and more questonable incidence of violence from the other as the greatest sin. Your contentions mirror those of Obama and the West in general. When the settlers and the IDF carry out these atrocities routinely, no one bat’s an eye. Such violence is recorded but buried in the annals of history, perhaps to become the footnote of some scholarly writing. Yet when Hamas murders these settlers (not civilians), the media makes a splash over the violent Palestinians and their dedication to terrorism.
2) It may help your cause to condemn Hamas or the Palestinians hastily, wishing of some fruitful Palestinian Gandhian movement that appeals to the Western sentiment. But keep in mind that the West has always been either blissfully hypocritical or intentionally dimissive of its own violent stance towards the Third World, widely subscribing to imperialist-supremecist views of Arab and Muslims states either as inherently violent or forever uncivilized. These prejudices as applied to the I/P conflict are not helped by the popularity of the Zionist narrative of Jews as the eternal victims acting out purely and solely in self-defense against murderous and untrustworthy Arab hordes.
If this latest in a very long line of killings in the low grade war against the indigenous population of the region was actually a Palestinian initiative (which I doubt), then applying IDFspeak, the woman and the child could only be described as human shields. And the invaders, sorry, settlers have shown a callous disregard for the lives of these non-combatants in their efforts to avoid the righteous efforts of the brave “Palestinians” to protect their homeland.
The invaders, sorry again, settlers forced the brave “Palestinians” into a situation where they could not avoid the ensuing collateral damage. From an IDF point of view this incident would be well within the ROE. Just another regrettable tragedy of war really.
It is certainly no excuse for Israel to discontinue the dialogue between itself and whoever it is they are talking to. For all I know they might be just talking to themselves. Given that Mr. Abbas has little by way of a mandate, it may be that the actual Palestinian people have no representation at all in these talks. Forgive my cynicism, but the last thing Israel wants is a resolution of this interminable conflict. The Israeli narrative demands the constant presence of a threat to its “right to exist” (a concept which is in turn a philosophical nonsense). Without the threat, the narrative becomes meaningless. If the Messiah does happen to turn up soon and peace does actually reign on earth, then the zionist narrative will be toast. :-)
“[I]t’s a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it’s primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror.” – The Chomsky
Anyway, great article. It seems like even the most bilious hater of Zionists would be incapable of discounting #4 as a prime reason for nonviolent resistance. What has been counted as “victory” against the Israelis in recent battles can also attest to the futility of fighting. While Hezbollah certainly inflicted damage in 2006 and should be credited for proving self defense is universal, I’d have a hard time convincing a parent in Qana visiting the grave of their child that Lebanon “won” anything.
As for #5, the attack and the response to it vindicates that outlook. Once again, even looking at it from a cold, pragmatic perspective one has to admit that “hearts and minds” aren’t won with dead pregnant women. Just ask the Afghans. And looking at it from a humanist perspective, if someone thinks they’re superior to you and that your sole purpose in life is jealous retribution for being born a mere mortal surrounded by their Chosen Greatness, lashing out like an inner city gangbanger will hardly convince them or any outside party that there isn’t “something to” that chauvinism.
It’s easy for me to say “truth will out” to the Palestinians from the comfort of my American living room, but they deserve better and unfortunately the present onus is on them to show it. Israel has nothing but excuses, so remove those and you’re one big step ahead. Also, how many people remember Nathuram Godse nowadays?
All the articles I’ve seen so far on the talks are all about what the Palestinians must do. Israel just needs to sit pretty, and if it feels like it, nod. And with the settlers’ killings, the focus is even more narrowly put on Israeli security. LA Times has done two pieces, one on “disputed’ Hebron as a powderkeg that could ruin the microcosm the talks, and other on how Palestinian security forces face pressure to step up effort to prevent violence against settlers.
Nowhere is there one mention of what Palestinians face in the West Bank, the harassment by IOF AND the settlers. Not one word about what Israel should do to establish good faith! Even the references to the fake settlement moratorium do not give any context about why Palestinians won’t the freeze — i.e. that it is being built on their stolen land and they more are built, the less land there is for a Palestinian state. Instead you’d think the bad Palestinians won’t even let the Israelis build on their own land.
It’s nauseating.
Oh dear, mods, could you fix the coding on my prior post?!