No Peace, No Justice: Just Deception

Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS

Despite attempts by the Council for the National Interest and other like groups to bring in non-Israeli supporters as witnesses, Lantos limited the witnesses to Dennis Ross and David Wurmser, two predictable advocates for the Israeli state based on “reality on the ground,” a euphemism for justifying the theft of Palestinian land. “The opening statements by Chairman Lantos and ranking minority member Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R. FL) were even more biased than the testimony of two well-known pro-Israeli supporters Dennis Ross and David Wurmser.” (CNI news statement, 12/6/07). When our representatives predetermine the debate by hand-picking their speakers, they negate the efficacy of the effort and make a laughing stock of justice.

It occurred to me as I listened on the 26th of November to Mahmoud Abbas plea before the gathering at Annapolis that if justice for each and every person living in Palestine and Israel became the premise of a new syllogism for peace, a meaningful reconciliation would ensue and a lasting harmony would flower in this now desolate land. But until Justice is addressed, the dove of peace is only a cruel deception. Unless and until both Israelis and Palestinians accept the humanity of the other, recognize, accept and deplore the inhumane actions each has inflicted on the other, and seek forgiveness and reconciliation of the other, no lasting peace will ever bloom.

“With all frankness and without any hesitation, I have to defend the right of my people to open their eyes to a new dawn free of occupation, settlements, apartheid walls, prisons full of prisoners, targeted assassinations or siege of checkpoints around villages and towns.… I would also like to speak to the citizens of Israel on this exceptional occasion to tell them: our (sic) (we’re) neighbors on this small piece of land, neither you nor we are begging for peace from one another… Peace and freedom are our rights just as peace and security are your rights and ours. It is time that the cycle of bloodshed, violence and occupation end.” (Mahmoud Abbas, translation from PLO Washington Office)

How heroic, or, perhaps, how clownish, this scene appears in reflection. This man stands before the world community as the “accepted” representative of the Palestinian people, brought by the two powers that had abandoned him months ago as an effective negotiating partner. Perhaps he was tempted by the possibility that, somehow out of this everlasting morass, the conscience of both the United States and Israel had been pricked by the reality of the devastation wrought against the people of Palestine, and peace might be made and a future secured. One could weep with Abbas as he asserts the two essentials he and all Palestinians yearn for, a country free of occupation, land theft, walls of separation, prisons, assassinations, checkpoints and return of their rights under International Law. Thus does he stand, a lonesome voice dependent on the good will, the compassion, the sense of justice that lives in the hearts and souls of George W. Bush and Ehud Olmert, his benefactors that lured him to Annapolis hoping he might sign away the rights of the Palestinian people by giving credibility to a Jewish only state blessing in the process their right to deny citizenship to Palestinian Arabs and nullify the International Law of Return for those ethnically cleansed and forced from their home land.

No political intervention imposed by the biased broker of record, the United States, the Bush administration in particular, citing “the reality on the ground” as the basis for carving out of Palestine an Israeli State defined by its Wall and its annexed borders, leaving the remaining walled in fragments of overcrowded Bantustans for the poverty ridden Palestinians, will result in peace or justice. Indeed, should “the reality on the ground” become the basis for resolving the crisis in Israel/Palestine, we will have set in concrete the reality that neither justice nor International Law determines what is right, just the will of those with the might to willingly inflict their ends on the weak without mercy, compassion, or humanity.

It’s an old story told most tellingly by Joseph Conrad in “Heart of Darkness” when Marlow observes “They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” Conrad wrote about the conquest of the Congo over a century ago by Leopold II of Belgium whose sense of superior righteousness and advanced civilization gave him license to conquer at will only to find out that his superior status and advanced civilization had catapulted his nation back to primordial slime where they thrived in bestiality and personal degradation.

But this is the tradition of imperial mentality that Ben Gurion and the Zionists brought with them from Europe when they invaded Palestine. They too held out the lamp of their superior status as rationale for conquest necessitating “robbery, violence and murder on a great scale.” Yet, as I consider the actions of the Zionists in those early years, I do not see an innocence wrapped in some incomprehensible intent, the ignorance that allowed the average Belgium to participate in the King’s cruel enslavement of the natives; I see rather a calculated undertaking to steal land and ethnically expel a population by forcing on the Jewish community a participation they had no choice but to join or suffer the consequences of a calculated punishment including coercion, violence, and death. And with that heartless and ruthless control they, too, like Leopold failed to reflect on their actions until they had subjected their people to a like bestiality and degradation. How horrible a thought that the Jews, who have endured centuries of discrimination at the hands of those stronger than they, should become in turn the agent of discrimination against a defenseless people.

We need a totally different mindset to resolve this conflict; patching together the tattered goals of the Oslo Agreements, the pot-holed byways of the forgotten Road Map, the changed reality that Sharon and Olmert have erected on Palestinian land, and the beliefs embedded in the unreal expectations of the Hamas charter, will not achieve peace, only a set of impossible goals already objected to by both parties. I wrote this psalm at the beginning of this century and it seems particularly relevant today:

We need to return to the origins of this debacle that has culminated in our day in the catastrophic evil that thrives in this ancient land that held such promise for the world. Is it not time for the United Nations, on behalf of people throughout the world, to confront this history that has, in 60 years, transformed Palestine into a despicable icon of modern humanity’s mentality to impose by calculated force degradation, despair, and death on a helpless people and stand indifferent to that devastation?  

At the beginning of the last century, almost 100 years ago, Jews and Arabs lived in relative calm with each other, despite the superior numbers of Arab Palestinians living in the British governed Mandate of Palestine. That reality is noted by the High Commissioner of the Palestine Government in his reports recently made available to me through the Chief Archivist at the Rhodes Library at Oxford. It is also the opinion of Dr. Karen Armstrong in her historical studies of the mid-east, and Houston Smith author of The World’s Religions, among other scholars. Jews living in that period worked with Arab leaders to create agreements that would provide for increased numbers of Jewish immigrants, religious tolerance, and shared government. (MSS. Medit. S. 20 Rhodes House Library Archives, Bodleian Library, Oxford University).

Indeed, the British Government operating in Palestine attempted to assist this development and in so doing recognized the establishment of the Jewish Agency to work on behalf of the Jewish community. Unfortunately, this Agency and its security police were taken over by a small group of immigrant Zionists whose agenda did not include cooperation with the indigenous Arab population or the Arab states surrounding Palestine. Their agenda, in their own words, was to make Palestine a National Home for Jews alone. Over time, from the early to mid thirties through the declaration of the existence of the state of Israel in May of 1948, the Zionist Organization acted, in the words of the High Commissioner, as an Oligarchy that controlled every aspect of Jewish life using intimidation, coercion, and fear of physical harm and even death to impose their will. That, too, is recorded in the evidence presented to the British Secretary of State by the High Commissioner, evidence from seized documents of the Jewish Agency, the Hagana, its military force, and related sources.

By 1936, the Palestinian Arabs understood the Zionists’ intent and the protection being given to them by the British authorities, primarily as a result of the British policy outlined in the Balfour Declaration. In 1936, the Palestinians rose up against the Mandate authority and were severely beaten. By 1939, Britain understood the insoluble outcomes of the Zionist goal of an exclusively Jewish National Home that threatened the very real homeland of the Arabs living in Palestine. Under International Law, and under the expressed provisions of the Balfour Declaration reiterated by Winston Churchill, the Palestine Government had responsibility to protect both Jews and Arabs. Therefore in 1939 they issued the “White Paper” that set limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Zionists reacted bitterly and became in effect terrorists against the British authority in Palestine.

With their vast military superiority, the Zionist Hagana, Irgun, and Stern groups, a well trained and well equipped army that could field between 60,000 to 80,000 troops, overran the weakened Palestinian forces that had been decimated by the British in 1936. Before the demise of the Mandate Government in May of 1948, the Zionists had blitzed their way through 418 Palestinian towns and villages, razed them, massacred thousands, and forced 700,000 or more Palestinian Arabs onto foreign lands in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt or into refugee camps in the West Bank or Gaza. After the 1967 war, Israel owned or occupied by annexation or confiscation over 76% of the original land in Palestine.