[wvns] It's not just the occupation
It's not just the occupation
By Ali Abunimah
Bitterlemons International
http://www.bitterlemons-international.org/previous.php?opt=1&id=183
"Forty years ago today was the last day the citizens of Israelwere a
free people in their own land," wrote Ha'aretz columnist Akiva Eldar
on June 4. "It was the last day we lived here without living other
peoples' lives."
This sums up the cherished mythology of what is still called
the Israeli left and much of the international peace process
industry--that prior to the 1967 war, Israel was pure and on
the right path. Had it not "become an occupier" the region
would have had a happier history and Israel would be an
accepted member of the international community rather than a
pariah wearing the "apartheid" label.
The exclusive focus on the occupation serves increasingly to
obscure that the conflict in Palestine is at its core a
colonial struggle whose boundaries do not conveniently
coincide with the lines of June 4, 1967.
I do not often agree with leaders of the settler movement, but
they speak a truth Israeli and American liberals prefer to
ignore when they point out that the settlements in Gaza and
the West Bank built after 1967 are not morally different from
towns and kibbutzim inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. The
Israel that was created in 1948 was established on land
violently expropriated from ethnically-cleansed Palestinians.
Israel has been maintained as a "Jewish state" only by the
imposition of numerous laws that maintain the inferior status
of its Palestinian citizens and forcibly exclude Palestinian
refugees.
Even Israelis who condemn the occupation support these racist
laws. There is an Israeli consensus that it is legitimate to
defend the Jewish state against the so-called "demographic
threat" from Palestinians who will be again, as they were
prior to 1948, the majority population group in
Palestine-Israel despite six decades of Israeli efforts to
reduce their numbers with expulsions, massacres and
administrative ethnic cleansing. It is the imperative to
gerrymander an enclave with a Jewish majority rather than any
recognition of Palestinian equality that underpins whatever
limited rhetorical Israeli support exists for a Palestinian
state.
The slogan "end the occupation" has come to mean all things to
all people. For Israel's ruling elites, the quisling leaders
of Fateh and the Quartet it can even include Israel's
permanent annexation of most settlements. Demanding an end to
the occupation only so Israel can continue to function as a
racist ethnocracy within "recognized borders" is not a
progressive position any more than supporting apartheid South
Africa's bantustans would have been.
Because Israel's colonialism harms all Palestinians, not just
those living in the 1967 occupied territories, we cannot limit
ourselves to demanding that the 40-year old infrastructure of
military dictatorship be dismantled in the West Bank and Gaza.
We must simultaneously demand the abolition of all racist laws
throughout the country, including those allowing foreign Jews
to immigrate while Palestinians are kept out, as well as
discrimination in land allocation, housing, education and the
economy.
We must recast the struggle as one for democracy and equal
rights for all the people who live in the country. This
involves two kinds of work: solidarity in the form of boycott,
divestment and sanctions against the Israeli apartheid system
in all its disguises, and the articulation of a vision of a
shared future inspired by the values of the peace settlements
in Northern Ireland and South Africa. Leaders of Israel's one
million Palestinian citizens have put forward imaginative and
concrete proposals for democratization and equality. They are
already paying the price: Israel's Shin Bet secret police has
received official blessing to subvert even legal activities
that challenge the superior rights reserved for Jews.
Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza have failed to
offer a compelling vision, even though many recognize that the
two-state solution is a mirage.
Of course Israelis will not easily give up their privileges
any more than whites in Alabama, Georgia or Mississippi did in
the face of the American civil rights movement. But racism is
not a lifestyle choice the rest of the world is obligated to
respect. Determined movements can bring about transformations
that seem scarcely imaginable from the depths of the gloom. We
have seen enough shining examples to maintain our hope and
inspire us to action.-
Ali Abunimah is cofounder of the online publication The
Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal
to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
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