Betrayal of the Palestinians
Rashed Rahman
The current round of violence in Palestine was triggered by the Israeli security forces trying to quell protests during Ramzan in and around Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, considered Islam’s third holiest shrine, whose sanctity was thereby violated. The protests revolved around the latest round of expulsions of Palestinians from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem in favour of Israelis trying to grab those properties. The violation of Al Aqsa’s sanctity triggered Palestinian protests in the West Bank and Gaza, met with ferocious force by the Israeli security forces, a pattern familiar from the past. This led, almost inexorably, to the exchange of rockets from Gaza on Israel and Israeli retaliation from ground artillery and the air on Gaza. The toll so far in one week: 192 Palestinians killed in Gaza, including 58 children, 1,200 wounded, large parts reduced to rubble, including an airstrike on a building housing international media houses.
In Israel, 10 people have been killed, more than 280 wounded. Hamas fired 3,000 rockets, the highest rate ever, of which 450 fell within Gaza, and more than 1,000 were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system. Violence has also broken out between Jews and Arab-Israelis, with the deadliest clashes in the occupied West Bank yielding 19 Palestinians killed in one week.
True to form, the UN Security Council (UNSC), despite being chaired in rotation by China’s Wang Yi, could not take an unequivocal position on the Israeli aggression and use of disproportionate force because of Israel’s long standing main supporter, the US. It may not be out of place to recall that UNSC resolutions 242, 252, 259, 261, 271 and 2334, and UN General Assembly resolution 2253 regarding Israel’s occupation and annexation of Palestinian territories since the 1967 war and consistent and repeated attempts to change their demography by expelling Palestinians and installing Israelis in their place remain unimplemented because of the same US obstruction.
The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Arab League have once again demonstrated in practice their toothlessness. High sounding condemnatory verbalising aside, neither has moved a finger to help the hapless Palestinians. If they have any self-respect, all those Arab states, past and recent, who have recognized Israel should be blushing with shame and embarrassment. The Palestinians have been betrayed and left to their own devices by the Arab and Muslim world again and again. The US-led west does not permit the UNSC to overcome its long standing paralysis on the issue. How have the Palestinians been reduced to this pass, and what does the future hold for them?
Israel is an imperialist dagger thrust deep into the heart of the Middle East. The mistreatment and oppression of Jews in Europe (not, one might add, in the Middle East or Arab world) instigated the Zionist movement that demanded a home for the scattered (since ancient times) Jews in what constituted Palestine, on the dubious revanchist argument of it being the ancient home of the Jews from which they were expelled or forced to flee. British colonialism held the Palestine Mandate after WWI, and Lord Balfour had already presented a Zionist drafted resolution in the British parliament endorsing this demand in 1917. Between the two world wars, the British Mandate authorities connived at Jewish immigration into Palestine to change its demography and give the Zionists a toehold on the soil of Palestine. The Nazi horrors against the Jews in WWII provided the emotional baggage that seemed to justify the enhanced immigration of Jews from all over the world to Palestine immediately after WWII. By 1948, when the state of Israel was established, Zionist armed gangs were expelling Palestinians (theNaqbah) and also, at least until 1948, fighting the British Mandate authorities. The great western powers then colluded in the UNSC to declare the partition of Palestine between the Zionist state of Israel and the rest of Palestine. But the latter territories were never in the control of the Palestinians. Instead, neighbouring Arab countries took control of those territories, which Israel nibbled away at in the 1956 war and completely occupied (and to some extent annexed) in the 1967 war.
Since then, despite restoring Gaza to Palestinian control while turning it into the largest open air prison in the world, and at least nominally allowing the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) control over the West Bank, Israel has been nibbling away at the latter territory through settling its people there. The East Jerusalem effort is only the latest such campaign.
The neighbouring, and even some distant Arab countries, have abandoned the Palestinian cause and left its people in dire straits. Not commanding any territory of their own, the Palestinian armed resistance that broke out in 1968 after the 1967 debacle suffered from a lack of secure base from which to conduct military operations. Jordan demolished the Palestinian base on its territory after Black September, 1970. Pakistan earned the distinction in that conflict of the massacre of Palestinian refugees in their camps in Amman, which were encircled and annihilated by the tanks of then Brigadier Ziaul Haq. Lebanon, where the bulk of the Palestinian fighters were forced to relocate, pummelled them at the hands of the Lebanese fascist movement Phalange, cooperated with and helped massacre Palestinian refugees in their camps during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and finally forced the Palestinian fighters and leadership to relocate to Tunisia and other Arab countries physically removed from Palestine. This virtually put an end to the Palestinian armed resistance.
Turning to diplomacy through the Oslo Accords of 1992 and US mediation between the Palestinians and Israel further weakened the Palestinian hand and afforded Israel the (continuing to this day) opportunity to carry out its expansionist ambitions piecemeal and virtually without serious demur from the world. The so-called two state solution is dead in the water. Only one state, and that too the Zionist entity Israel, exists, and likely will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. The hapless people of Palestine will have to find new, creative ways and means to confront the US-led west’s settler colonialist Israeli enterprise. Peaceful protest, including intifadas, has yielded nothing. The logic of a return to armed resistance is impeccable, but difficult.
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