Israel’s War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands

Others

A right-wing Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu is widely seen as spelling the end of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Given the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Netanyahu has promised to accelerate, no other outcome seems conceivable.

The film is applauded for its courage in confronting a complicity that has long been part of the historical record. This confrontation ends up leading to redemption much more than to condemnation. And hardly anyone suggests that Israel’s current military operations should also be bravely examined. I suppose that we will have to wait for another award-winning film, a quarter-century from now, to do that.

Tom Segev: A War of Whims

19 February 2009

On the evening of October 29, 1956, Israel, allied with France and Great Britain, attacked Egypt, and the Sinai Campaign began. The operation lasted for about 100 hours and cost the lives of over 170 Israeli soldiers. Over the years, the widespread perception has been that Israel wanted this war, but to this day there is no consensus among scholars about the reasons why.

Despite the lack of clarity about the next government, one thing is becoming painfully clear – the entire left-wing bloc has suffered a crushing defeat in the election.

The film “Waltz with Bashir” belongs to the kvetch genre: “Oy, how traumatic that massacre in Sabra and Chatila was for us.” The Jewish Agency is afraid that the tender soul of American Jewry might be hurt by the film and therefore it is offering them psychological relief on the Internet (jewishculture.org).

If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity, it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition.

In the long sixty-year tortured history of the Palestinian expulsion from their lands, Congress has maintained that it is always the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority, and now Hamas who are to blame for all hostilities and their consequences with the Israeli government. The latest illustration of this Washington puppet show, backed by the most modern weapons and billions of taxpayer dollars annually sent to Israel, was the grotesquely one-sided Resolutions whisked through the Senate and the House of Representatives.

I write as an Israeli. In the past two-and-a-half weeks Israeli forces have killed over 900 people in Gaza; Palestinian rockets have killed four Israelis and Palestinian fighters have killed six soldiers.

Deliberate attacks on civilians that lack strict military necessity are war crimes. Israel’s current violations of international law extend a long pattern of abuse of the rights of Gaza Palestinians. Eighty percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents are Palestinian refugees who were forced from their homes or fled in fear of Jewish terrorist attacks in 1948. For 60 years, Israel has denied the internationally recognized rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes — because they are not Jews.

It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

The lessons from these data are clear: First, Hamas can indeed control the rockets, when it is in their interest. The data shows that ceasefires can work, reducing the violence to nearly zero for months at a time. Second, if Israel wants to reduce rocket fire from Gaza, it should cherish and preserve the peace when it starts to break out, not be the first to kill.

With governments and international institutions failing to do their jobs, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee – representing hundreds of organisations – has renewed its call on international civil society to intensify its support for the sanctions campaign modelled on the successful anti-apartheid movement.

TWO MYTHS have been with us for a while now… The first is that the way to get out of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio is by engaging in a “peace process,” and the second is that the result of that peace process is pretty much well-known.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Moshe Neeman: No Atonement

14 October 2004

1. Dominate thy neighbor. No atonement necessary for an occupation that deprives the Palestinian population of life, liberty and even brief moments of happiness. We’ll continue violating every international law and convention that stands in our way.

2. Nothing succeeds like success. The thirty-seven-year-old occupation continues in full force and will remain in place. With lands confiscated and settled, the territories as we knew them in 1967 no longer exist. And with every Israeli under 50 raised with the occupation in the background, the territories are no longer “occupied”–a term that suggests an interim condition–but rather transformed into areas permanently and irreversibly controlled by Israel. Incidentally, this process follows closely the “creation of facts” that took place in pre-state and immediately post-state Israel.

IOA Editor: A very important discussion on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and ‘God-given land’ claims by Israelis, including Said’s recognition of Jewish/Zionist rights in Palestine – but not as “the only claim or the main claim,” rather, as “a claim, among many other.”

Edward Said’s comments are as relevant today as they were in 2003, a few months before his death. They serve as an excellent ‘reality check’ against the current focus on Settlement Freeze – an insulting diversion from the main discussion: the Occupation itself.