>Subject: Al-Haq | Human Rights Issues | Historical Context
>Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 22:34:51 -0500 (EST)
>
> Human Rights Issues
> Human Rights Index
>
> AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN THE OCCUPIED
> PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES
> _________________________________________________________________
>
> The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is now in its
> thirty-second year; however, preoccupation with the land of Palestine
> long precedes 1967. When understood in this wider context of the
> history of the land and the people of Palestine, today's reports of
> human rights' violations in the Occupied Territories gain a disturbing
> coherence and their full significance is more readily apparent. The
> proper picture that emerges is irreconcilable with Israeli declared
> policy, which claims to remain within the parameters of international
> law. Such law dictates that all changes in the existing system should
> have been made for the benefit of the local population or the
> occupation forces. On the contrary, the facts would seem to indicate
> that the current Israeli objective is to alienate the people and annex
> the land of Palestine. In this the present government of Israel
> follows a colonialist approach evident since the mid-nineteenth
> century.
>
> European interest in the area from the 1830s provides the first
> example of this colonial paradigm and its inherent dichotomy between a
> desired land and an undesired people. The occasion for this modern
> involvement was the gradual erosion of the power of the Ottoman Turks
> in the region; the impetus a mix of European rivalries and the
> Christian belief in the 'Terra Sancta'. Mohammed Ali of Egypt, having
> conquered the area from his sovereign in Constantinople in 1831,
> allowed a European presence in Palestine to create an ally against
> Ottoman resurgence. Thus he facilitated European penetration by
> permitting the opening of consulates in Jerusalem and the expansion of
> missionary activity. When the Turks regained the territory in 1840,
> with the aid of Anglo-Prussian arms, they were obliged to continue
> this policy given their increasing dependence on Europe.
>
> The nature of European involvement was almost exclusively religious
> and cultural, dubbed a 'Peaceful Crusade' by some of its proponents.
> However, if this crusade, unlike its medieval predecessor, was carried
> out ostensibly peacefully, it was because diplomats had other wider
> preoccupations. Not least amongst them was the 'Eastern Question' -
> how best to preserve the balance of power in Europe as the Ottoman
> Empire deteriorated. In the thinking of the time this stability was
> best assured by supporting the ailing Ottoman regime rather than
> competing for territory and hastening its dissolution.
>
> This did not preclude competing for influence, however. France,
> traditional protector of the Catholics in the Middle East, and Russia,
> with similar responsibilities to the Orthodox community, had a natural
> constituency in the 'Holy Land'; England and Prussia, as Protestant
> powers, lacked this resource and accordingly needed to 'find' their
> own dependants. Christ Church, dedicated in 1849, was to form the
> institutional base to rival Catholic and Orthodox establishments;
> converted Jews were to form the congregation - an idea advanced by
> 'gentile Zionists' (most notably Lord Shaftesbury) and born of the
> chiliastic belief in the importance of the conversion and repatriation
> of the Jews. The Russian Compound is one legacy found in Jerusalem
> today of the European nineteenth century rivalry, the Israeli policy
> for the Judaization of the city another. The existing, predominantly
> Muslim, Arab population of the region was considered at best of no
> interest by the peaceful crusaders, at worst a threat to their
> influence in the biblical lands.
>
> Prescriptions for the future of the local populace followed the
> prevalent norms of colonial thinking; the solutions suggested then are
> consonant with those advanced, and indeed practised, to the present
> day. Some, more 'liberal' minds saw a future for the qualities
> inherent in the natives, which, "if developed, would make a useful
> population out of them" as "hewers of wood and drawers of water".1 For
> others a solution similar to that proposed for North American Indians
> was to be used, with the nomadic population to be put in reservations
> and the sedentary agriculturists to "make a valuable labour force
> which could be employed by immigrant capitalists".2 Yet there were
> some who "would preach throughout Christendom a new crusade ... for
> the obliteration from the sacred soil of Palestine of every trace of
> the grass-destroying hoof-prints of the Moslum spoiler".3 What all
> shared in common was a conviction that the population would cease to
> hold the land whether willingly or forcibly deprived of it.
>
> By the turn of the twentieth century Christian claims to the land were
> joined by the calls of nascent Zionism for a 'Heimstatte' (homeland).
> The 'Jewish Question' of how to live amongst the gentiles was made all
> the more pressing by incidents of the late nineteenth century -
> notably the Dreyfus Affair in France and the pogroms in Eastern
> Europe. For Herzl the answer to this renewed anti-Semitism of European
> nations was for Jews to create a national identity of their own:
> political Zionism. The ascendancy of British power in the Middle East
> as the Ottoman's waned provided Zionism with a powerful ally. Not only
> favourably disposed to Jewish return (see above), the British also, as
> fellow Europeans, more readily understood the language and aspirations
> of Jewish 'nationalism'. To the British colonial and Christian mind
> Zionism was "of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices
> of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land".4 In the
> historical context of colonialism - where on continent after continent
> European states vied with each other to appropriate the maximum
> possible land with scant regard for the rights of indigenous peoples -
> to the Great Powers the Jewish colonisation of Palestine must have
> seemed acceptable if not commendable.
>
> Indeed the fundamentally racist assumptions justifying the 'white
> man's burden' for Britain from the Caribbean to the Pacific and 'la
> mission civilisatrice' for the French underpinned Jewish views of the
> Palestinian population. Herzl's diaries show him to be a child of his
> age, the age of imperialism. Whilst to others he asked, "who would
> think of sending them away? It is their well-being, their individual
> wealth which we will increase by bringing in our own", in his personal
> reflections he pledged to "try to spirit the penniless population
> across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries,
> while denying it employment in our own country". Publicly the Jews
> would be "excellent brothers" to the Arabs; privately he described
> Palestine as "a plague-ridden, blighted corner of the Orient". Indeed,
> his unsuccessful request for a charter for the establishment of a
> Jewish-Ottoman Colonisation Association in Palestine - submitted to
> Constantinople in 1901 - included the right for Jews to deport the
> native population (Article Three of the draft).
>
> The alliance of Jewish and European colonialism in the late nineteenth
> and early twentieth century is perhaps unsurprising; what is
> remarkable is the persistence of the colonial paradigm in the late
> twentieth century. Since Wilson's Fourteen Points (1918)5 the
> prevailing intolerance for colonialism has necessitated a change in
> the cosmetics, but unfortunately not the fundamental core, of Zionism.
> In a climate where a people's right to self-determination is defended,
> indeed enshrined, in international law, it has been necessary to deny
> the existence of 'a people' in the land of Palestine. Israel
> Zwangill's widely propagated axiom - describing Palestine as "a land
> without a people, for a people without a land"- although now widely
> acknowledged as a deliberate fallacy, is indicative of this approach.6
> On a theoretical level Zionists have asserted that, because Palestine
> was not a coherent 'nation state' by the standards of European
> political thought, there was no such entity as the Palestinian people.
> On a physical level they have practised population transfer - or, in
> modern parlance, 'ethnic cleansing' - to realise the myth of a
> people-less Palestine.7
>
> The demographic statistics available from the nineteenth century
> onwards speak otherwise; whatever the semantic debate about the
> presence of a 'nation', the facts prove the existence of a populace in
> the region today occupied by Israel, which was overwhelmingly both
> Arab and sedentary. In 1871/2, prior to the first wave of Jewish
> (retrospectively named) aliya, Jews made up 4% of a population of
> approximately 64,000 households. Even by 1915 Jews held only 2% of the
> land and the Jewish population made up only 10% of the total after The
> Great War.8 In the context of Wilson's Fourteen Points and the
> principle of self-determination, the population advantage should have
> decided in favour of the Arabs. However, the sympathy of Western
> powers for the Zionist cause and the notorious Balfour Declaration
> weighed against them. Political expediency counted for more than the
> resident population in deciding the future of the land.
>
> The occupiers of Palestinian territory since 1918 - Britain, Jordan
> and Israel - have been confronted with this fact, namely that
> Palestine is and always has been a land with a people. The means of
> repressing the population have altered little from the colonial model
> set by Britain under the Mandate: police brutality, collective
> punishment and disruption of the economic life of the people are
> approaches followed by all three; the very same buildings have served
> as prisons under the successive occupations. For Israel, however, the
> enduring fact of an indigenous people presents a particular conundrum.
> The presence of a large, non-Jewish population in those areas occupied
> in 1967 has threatened the Jewish, democratic basis of the modern
> Zionist state. If Israel retains the land seized in 1967, it has to
> decide what status the Palestinians would hold in the state. If
> included as citizens, they threaten to dilute and ultimately overwhelm
> the 'Jewish-ness' of Israel. If deprived of equal rights, such an
> Arab-Jew apartheid system would be antithetical to the avowedly
> 'democratic' basis of Israel.
>
> Yet the land occupied in 1967 provides numerous possible advantages to
> Israel. As in the case of Sinai, land could be returned in exchange
> for recognition of Israel's right to exist - the so-called 'land for
> peace' formula. Ostensibly at least, this is the policy favoured by
> the government of Israel for the remaining territories. However, the
> advantages of returning the land are weighed against the strategic,
> military importance and resources available from it, not least water.
> Furthermore, particularly in the wake of Likud's influence since 1977,
> the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 is seen to hold
> psychological value as part of the Hebrew kingdom of Israel, which
> supersedes its strategic significance. Whether security or spiritual
> issues are predominant, the government's determination to hold onto
> the land is evident through settlement activity.
>
> Israel's dilemma revisits that of the colonial age - how to
> appropriate the maximum amount of Palestinian land with the minimum
> number of Palestinian people. It is also worth noting that the
> government has ensured that the precise status of the territory and
> its population should remain undecided.9 Such ambiguity not only
> avoids the need to resolve the paradox of how Israel can remain both
> Jewish and democratic: it also affords the time to create new 'facts
> on the ground' in order to prejudice eventual decisions regarding the
> future of the land and its people. These years of uncertainty have
> witnessed the concerted and calculated attempt to back up the claim to
> the geography by altering the demography in favour of Israel.
>
> It is a bitter irony that the peace process - in having supposedly set
> a time limit to Israeli influence over the occupied territories - has
> in fact encouraged the acceleration of settlement since Oslo. The
> widely publicised case of Jabal Abu Ghneim ('Har Homa') is but one
> part of a broader agenda to prejudice the impending final status
> negotiations by creating a de facto Israeli presence throughout the
> territory. Settlement building has not only cut off Palestinian East
> Jerusalem from the West Bank; the expansion of Jerusalem's municipal
> borders threatens to sever the territory in two. Together with the
> comprehensive network of Israeli bypass roads between settlements,
> this strategy will accomplish the secondary aim of ensuring what land
> Palestine does recover is economically crippled, lacking viable
> borders - permanently dependent on Israel. Such an eventuality would
> bear close resemblance to the apartheid system practised in South
> Africa until 1993.10
>
> It is in this light that the human rights violations such as land
> confiscation, demolition of homes, settlement construction and
> confiscation of ID cards from Palestinian Jerusalemites should be
> seen. These individual cases are crucial parts of a process of ethnic
> cleansing of which the Judaization of Jerusalem constitutes the
> clearest example. Meanwhile, the extensive and intensive use of
> administrative detention and sanction of 'moderate physical pressure'
> against prisoners (which is properly defined as torture by the UN) not
> only crushes popular resistance to such a process, but also acts as a
> catalyst to it in deterring potential Palestinian returnees. Israel is
> quite simply taking steps to erase rather than confront the paradox
> created in 1967. These steps follow a familiar path, which can be
> traced back to colonialism and the nineteenth century, and which leads
> to the annexation of the land and the alienation of the people of
> Palestine.
> _________________________________________________________________
>
> 1Conder, "The Present Condition of Palestine", Palestine Exploration
> Fund Quarterly Statement, 1879, pp. 8f.
> 2Oliphant, The Land of Gilead with Excursion in the Lebanon,
> (Edinburgh and London, 1880), p.286.
> 3Walker, The Future of Palestine as a Problem of International Policy
> and in Connection with the Requirements of Christianity and the
> Expectation of the Jews, (London, 1881), p.39.
> 4Balfour (1919), quoted in C.Sykes, Kreuzwege nach Israel, (Munich,
> 1967), p.5.
> 5President Woodrow Wilson of the United States proposed Fourteen
> Points on which to base the post-war order. These included the right
> of all nations to 'self-determination'.
> 6Israel Zwangill, "The Return to Palestine", The New Liberal Review II
> (December 1901), p.627.
> 7A.Scholch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856 - 1882, (Washington,
> 1993), chap. 3, provides a more detailed analysis of the "European
> Interest in Palestine".
> 8Scholch, chap. 2.
> 9Witness the number of issues pending final status talks in the Oslo
> Accords; the use of military orders to effect law in the West Bank to
> which lawyers have no access (detailed by R.Shehadeh, in Occupier's
> Law, (Washington, 1988)); the conflicting claims that the West Bank is
> 'occupied territory', subject to the Geneva Convention, and also
> 'Judea and Samaria', subject to Jewish collective memory.
> 10The 1970 Bantu Homelands Act (later named the National States
> Citizenship Act) provided for the establishment of ten so-called
> homelands to which all black South Africans were to belong as citizens
> according to their ethnic, linguistic and cultural affiliation. This
> policy of denationalisation was in fact pursued by South African
> governments before the Act and, to some extent, may be traced back
> even before the National Party came to power in 1948. Unsurprisingly
> many blacks preferred to remain South Africans than to accept an
> 'independence', which made them aliens in their country of birth. It
> was the leaders of the homelands who mainly profited from
> 'independence' and often forced it on their people in collusion with
> the South African government. Note also that all the homelands relied
> on South Africa to balance their budgets, feed their people and
> provide employment for their surplus population.
> _________________________________________________________________
>
_____________________________
I felt myself becoming Palestinian and for the first time in my
life I began to hate Israel.... Jean Genet -- Prisoner of Love -- translated
by Barbara Bray
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