The Invasion
By Israel Shamir
April 3, 2002
Sharon’s Easter War is the end of a chapter, not of the
story.
This week, we learned the full measure of despair and
humiliation. Our protests and petitions, emails and
demonstrations turned out powerful as charms and curses
against tanks. Politically correct, or outrageous, witty
or rude, friends of equality in Palestine were
outgunned. The US President acclaimed ‘Israeli right to
self-defence’; BBC and CNN found a formula ‘in
response’; and Sharon’s troops invaded Palestinian
towns. They effectively eliminated the Palestinian
self-rule and carried out intensive searches, mass
arrests, and cold-blooded executions. In Bethlehem, a
peaceful demonstration of European non-violent
protesters was machine-gunned by the invaders. Local
people speak of dozens murdered Palestinians, shot
point-blank. Israel and the US, long managed by a single
set of men, block the UN and the international
organisations, while preparing the part two of their
operation, invasion of Gaza.
It is difficult time, but not as bleak as our enemies
would like us to think. The suborned Western media
reported on ‘fighting between Palestinians and
Israelis’; but, as a matter of fact, Israeli soldiers
met little resistance. Why the fabulously brave
Palestinian fighters did not give a fight to the
invading Jews?
One answer is obvious, and it was offered by the Israeli
journalist and peace activist, Uri Avneri. The disparity
of force is too big for the poorly equipped Palestinians
to take on the third strongest army in the world backed
up by its tame Juggernaut, the US. But there is another
reason Avneri did not mention: the Palestinian National
Authority (PNA) hasn’t become the national symbol worth
defending and dying for the Palestinians. Life under PNA
remained life under Jewish rule.
It is not the right time to dwell on PNA’s faults well
described by Robert Fisk and many others. I shall quote
only Muna Hamzeh from Deheishe refugee camp, who wrote:
‘Since Arafat and his authority took control of Zone A
in Bethlehem in December 1995, this is what he has used
"funds" for in Bethlehem: to build a new police station
with a new jail; new headquarters for his Preventive
Security forces; new headquarters for his intelligence;
new presidential headquarters for Arafat and his VIP
guests; and a personal helicopter pad built on Jabal
Anton, a small hilltop overlooking Dheisheh and the only
natural extension for the camp, where Arafat would have
been better off building a playground for the refugee
camp's children. This is what Arafat built in Bethlehem.
(‘Holocaust Revisited’, 12.3.02)
Muna Hamze exaggerated: Bethlehem received a fresh
facelift, its roads were paved, Manger square
refurbished, new hotels opened and quality of life
improved in the years of PNA administrative control.
Still she expressed the gut feeling of many her
countrymen, from Professor Said to the refugees in
Deheishe, deeply unsatisfied with the PNA. Whether they
tried to deliver the goods to the ultimate ruler,
Israel, or to the squeezed population, they weren’t
popular. PNA was established by the Israelis in order to
police Palestinian population. It was not established to
improve Palestinians’ life. I doubt it could do much
more.
In the unfolding Palestinian holocaust, PNA was forced
to play a morally ambiguous, nay, impossible part of
Judenrat, the Jewish Authority, established by Germans
in the ghetto and camps of the occupied Europe. Germans
had as little desire as Israelis to police and
administrate their alien subjects. They preferred to
give them a limited self-rule in internal affairs. Some
enlightened Nazis were ready to arrange a separate
Jewish state with the framework of the Third Reich,
somewhat along the lines of Sharon’s vision of the
Palestinian state. They actually did it around Lublin,
an area of Poland with big Jewish population. It had a
few names: Lublinland, Jewishland, Judenland, Jewish
Reserve, and Jewish Autonomous Area.
After the war, there were many books and plays produced
on the activities of this Jewish Authority. Jews were
unhappy with their own Judenrat, they considered it
‘corrupt’, ‘attentive to demands of the enemy’, and
other allegations so familiar to us today. But Judenrat
could not achieve more that it did. Nor could the PNA.
Palestinians did not receive a bout de soufflé, they
were and remained subjects of the Jewish apartheid
state, within or without the PNA.
Sharon’s invasion buried forever the screwy idea of
Palestinian self-rule (‘independence’) on a small slice
of Palestine. It was basically the Nazi idea of
Lublinland transferred to Ramallah by the Jewish
pseudo-left. The idea of democracy in all of Palestine,
liquidation of apartheid, came again to the forefront.
Do not look back with nostalgia for the days of PNA;
look forward with hope to the tomorrow’s free and
democratic Palestine, from the River to the Sea.
II
Muna Hamze called her essay ‘Holocaust Revisited’. The
holocaust image has been evoked by Jose Saramago, the
Portuguese Nobel Prize winning writer, who compared the
besieged Ramallah with the Warsaw Ghetto. Saramago, who
just yesterday was glorified by the Jewish press because
of his unorthodox treatment of Jesus, became an object
of massive attack. Among the attackers, there were the
leading lights of Israeli Jewish pseudo-Left, Ari Shavit
and Tom Segev.
Tom Segev mobilized his pen to the service of the Jewish
state. “Saramago declared that Israel's actions in the
territories are comparable to the crimes that were
perpetrated at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. That sounds
more like something he read on the inside of the door of
a public lavatory than something he wrote in his books.
What he said was harmful to the cause it was supposed to
serve, so he also emerged from the episode looking
stupid. “
Somehow I got tired of hearing this well-meaning mantra,
harmful to the cause, from the Jewish “left-wing”
advisers to Palestinians, from Tom Friedman or Tom Segev.
I do not believe they wish this cause to succeed. And
now, the practical difference between the Jewish ‘soft
left’ and ‘hard right’ became cosmetic. The following
lines were written by a ‘leftist’ Ari Shavit, but they
could be written by ‘extreme rightist’ Barbara Amiel,
Conrad Black’s wife and a friend to Sharon and Pinochet:
“The things Jose Saramago said on Monday in Ramallah
were not clear criticism of the occupation. They were an
ugly incitement against the Jews. They were not merely
foolish, nor only a statement of groundless historical
fact. They were a form of bloodletting. For if Ramallah
is Auschwitz - and that's the parallel Saramago drew -
then Israel is the Third Reich. It deserves extinction.
Maybe not all its citizens should be killed, but its
sovereign institutions should be smashed. And if
Ramallah is Auschwitz, then Tel Aviv is Dresden. Burning
it would not be a war crime.”
Professor Alan Stoleroff well answered him: “once again
there is an attempt by a left-wing Israeli to face the
cold facts of the ongoing crimes against humanity and
war crimes committed by the Israeli occupation. If
Saramago's words, or my own Jewish words, had compared
the encirclement and the blockades to the Warsaw ghetto,
would you react the same way? Didn't it come out in
Israeli papers that an Israeli general had urged the
study of Nazi tactics at Warsaw in order to put down the
Intifada? Didn't Israeli soldiers stamp serial numbers
on detained Palestinians? Don't 40% of Israeli Jews
respond positively to survey questions when asked if
they favor transfer of the Arabs? And the carpet bombing
of Dresden WAS itself a war crime”.
If Shavit insists, I am ready to oblige: Israel, this
Jewish apartheid state, deserves to disappear. Its
sovereign institutions indeed should be dismantled. And
its supporters elsewhere turn themselves into
participants of the war crimes, and into combatants to
their own peril. They would not be able to claim their
neutrality. The chasm is not an ethnic or religious, as
proven by Jerry Levin of Alabama.
Jerry Levin--CNN's Bureau Chief in Beirut, who was held
hostage by the Hizballah in 1984-85--and who these days,
is working with CPT (the Christian Peacemaker Teams) to
protect defenseless Palestinian children, women, and men
from settler rage and violence. He reminds of “Adam
Shapiro, who is Jewish, is a member of the International
Solidarity movement, and works in Ramallah”. One should
add marvellous Jennifer Loewenstein, whose report from
Gaza came now in Palestine networks, and other friends
of equality elsewhere. These people of differing
opinions together with their friends take on the
“left-right” block of Jewish supremacists.