[Marxism] Israel's true intentions

[Louis Proyect]

Counterpunch, January 1 , 2009
Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State
If Hamas Did Not Exist

By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

Let us get one thing perfectly straight. If the wholesale mutilation and 
degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to continue; if Israel’s will is 
at one with that of the United States; if the European Union, Russia, 
the United Nations and all the international legal agencies and 
organizations spread across the globe are going to continue to sit by 
like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making repeated “calls” for a 
“ceasefire” on “both sides”; if the cowardly, obsequious and supine Arab 
States are going to stand by watching their brethren get slaughtered by 
the hour while the world’s bullying Superpower eyes them threateningly 
from Washington lest they say something a little to their disliking; 
then let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth is taking place.

The state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the 
Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to 
do with “Terror”. It has nothing to do with the long-term “security” of 
the Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it 
is aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today. It 
has nothing to do with some conjured-up “war” – a cynical and overused 
euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale enslavement of any 
nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert that its 
resources are its own; that doesn’t want one of the Empire’s obscene 
military bases sitting on its cherished land.

This crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace. 
It is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash’al or Ismail Haniyeh. It 
is not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all 
circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest 
only now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop 
into the catastrophe that it is today. The Islamist factor has colored 
and will continue to color the atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted 
the current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the world’s 
population. The primary symbols today are Islamic – the mosques, the 
Qur’an, the references to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these 
symbols could disappear and the impasse would continue.

There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few 
Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. 
Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over 
the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as 
Arafat’s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The 
associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political 
environment. They are the result of something entirely different than 
what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They have 
become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle East 
today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant, deadly, 
angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their places.

Strip away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the 
servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the 
Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony; 
for power over the weak and dominion over the world’s wealth. Worse yet 
you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the 
racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to 
cover up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories 
and models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The 
callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our very 
culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.

Strip away the current symbols and language of the victims of our 
selfish and devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned 
and unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the ‘wretched of the earth’ 
begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and 
their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave 
them alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their 
olives and their thyme; asking you first politely and then with 
increasing disbelief why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the 
land of their ancestors; unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of 
ravishment and devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and 
checkpoints and crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, 
concrete bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and 
death. Why is life without these policies and instruments of hell 
impossible?

The answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable, 
sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of 
allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it 
was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. It had no 
intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the 
1950s. It had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the 
remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and reinterpreted UN 
Security Council Resolution 248 to its own liking despite the 
overwhelming international consensus stating that Israel would receive 
full international recognition within secure and recognized borders if 
it withdrew from the lands it had only recently occupied.

It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the 
United Nations in 1974, when –alone with the United States—it voted 
against a two-state solution. It had no intention of allowing a 
comprehensive peace settlement when Egypt stood ready to deliver but 
received, and obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive of the 
rights of Palestinians and the remaining peoples of the region. It had 
no intention of working toward a just two-state solution in 1978 or 1982 
when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut so that it 
might annex the West Bank without hassle. It had no intention of 
granting a Palestinian state in 1987 when the first Intifada spread 
across occupied Palestine, into the Diaspora and the into the spirits of 
the global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately aided the newly 
formed Hamas movement so that it might undermine the strength of the 
more secular-nationalist factions.

Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at 
Oslo where the PLO was superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian 
Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at the wealth and prestige 
it gave them at the expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into the 
world’s satellites and microphones its desire for peace and a two-state 
solution, it more than doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements 
on the ground in the West Bank and around East Jerusalem, annexing them 
as it built and continues to build a superstructure of bypass roads and 
highways over the remaining, severed cities and villages of earthly 
Palestine. It has annexed the Jordan valley, the international border of 
Jordan, expelling any ‘locals’ inhabiting that land. It speaks with a 
viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall 
soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security.

Through the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that 
attempted to cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of 
oblivion; through the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges 
and infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through 
assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of 
disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic 
Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in 
the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of 
threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.

Israel, with the unconditional and approving support of the United 
States, has made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over 
and over again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no 
viable Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the 
rest of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the 
‘international community’? What will it take to see past the lies and 
indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full 
view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the 
ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch 
without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and 
complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.

The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept 
no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately 
control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to 
accede to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the 
equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular 
movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian 
law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people 
will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state 
must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 
4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if 
not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they 
live alongside its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d’etre, 
the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel’s reason for being change if the 
Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?

The lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the 
streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of 
vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the 
Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or 
not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.

Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East 
Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be 
reached at amadea311 at earthlink.net