01.01.09
The logic of colonial power
RG mail
The Guardian Gaza: the logic of colonial power
As so often, the term ‘terrorism’ has proved a rhetorical smokescreen
under cover of which the strong crush the weak
[1]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 [2]have even testified before the senate foreign
relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with
Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel [3]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 [4]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 [5]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 [6]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 â whether Israel,
America, Russia or China â 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 â 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.
[7]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 [8]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 [9]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 â a liberation movement that
collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and,
as usual, these elections are accompanied by war [10]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 [11]claims it is targeting Hamas’s military
forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces
and killing them, [12]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, Ã 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?
References
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nir-rosen
2. http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/002195.html
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/28/gaza-israel-palestinians-middle-east
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/14/iraq-georgebush
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/27/israel-nationalism-beiteinu-likud-gaza
6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/11/poetry.israelandthepalestinians
7. http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2008%20-%20Summer/full-Gentile.html
8. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7630534.stm
9. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011203/cortright
10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/27/israel-nationalism-beiteinu-likud-gaza
11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/28/israel-gaza-hamas
12. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2008/12/28/gaza-s-grief-225-dead-in-biggest-israeli-raid-in-40-years-115875-20998992/