BY ROHAN PEARCE
On April 10, eight Israelis died and 19 were wounded in a suicide bomb detonation on a bus travelling from Haifa to Jerusalem. Reports indicate that most of the victims of the blast were soldiers from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). What would make a person blow themselves up in order to kill a handful of soldiers?
Perhaps the bomber had witnessed the death of Sumaiah Najeh Abdulhadi Hassan, a six-year-old killed when an Israeli bullet struck her head while she was travelling with her pregnant mother and her grandfather from Rafah to Tel al-Sultan.
Between March 29 and April 8 alone, the suicide bomber could have witnessed any one of more than 230 deaths of Palestinians — any of which could have been the trigger.
Since the second intifada began in September 2000, at least 1300 Palestinians have been killed and more than 18,000 wounded — and perhaps one of these casualties was what finally caused the suicide bomber to commit such a desperate act.
Or maybe the bomber had been in Rafah when 600 people were left homeless in January, after the IDF bulldozed their houses.
In the end it doesn't really matter. The root cause of the (very unbalanced when only one side has tanks, F-16s and helicopter gunships) violence we are witnessing in the Israel/Palestine at the moment is not a case of "crazy" individuals or some innate hatred between Israelis and Palestinians. It's very definitely not a case of Israel defending itself against "savages" and "barbarians", as the Israeli government, led by maniacal war criminal Ariel Sharon, would have us believe.
The root cause is the establishment of Israel as a racist apartheid-style state, based on the displacement and subjugation of the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine. As long as Palestinians exist as a "people without land" there will be no peace.
Oslo 'peace process'
The current Palestinian uprising, the al Aqsa intifada, which Sharon uses to justify the current assault on Palestinians is the product of the failure of the Oslo "peace process", a deeply flawed series of negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, and the Israeli government designed to legitimise and cement Israel's displacement of Palestinians.
The negotiations began secretly in 1993. The outcome was a joint declaration of principles by Israel and the PLO. These principles were: mutual recognition by Israel and the PLO, Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, and withdrawals from other (unspecified) West Bank territories during a five-year period. The PLO was transformed into the Palestinian National Authority (PA), a limited form of self-government for Palestinians in the areas from which Israel withdrew.
The Oslo declaration didn't cover areas of vital importance to a final settlement including the size of the areas to become PA controlled, water rights within PA areas, the status of Palestinian refugees, the question of control of Jerusalem and the future of Israeli settlements within the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The PLO accepted such a flawed agreement in part due to its diplomatic isolation following its support for Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, and also because it gave the PLO leadership a degree of legitimacy as a future Palestinian government.
The "peace process" negotiations were supposed to be completed by May 1999, however intransigence by Israel, particularly regarding withdrawal from the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel during the June 1967 war with Jordan, Egypt and Syria, and periodic attacks on Israelis by Palestinian opponents of the Oslo agreement delayed its completion.
While the negotiations were underway, successive Israeli governments continued building Israeli settlements within the Occupied Territories and expanding existing ones. A network of roads within the territories was constructed for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers, while Palestinians were forced to pass through Israeli military checkpoints for even the most trivial of trips.
This network of roads and the further construction of settlements was an attempt by the Israeli government to ensure that when the time came for a final settlement over which areas would be governed by the Palestinians, the Israelis could assert their claim to as large an area as possible — which would leave any Palestinian state "independent" in name only.
A genuinely independent Palestinian state would not only endanger the economic interests of Israeli big business (by removing a useful source of cheap labour), but threaten Israel's internal political stability by providing political support for the struggles for equal rights of Palestinians living on the "inside", directly under the Israeli apartheid regime — the "Israeli Arabs".
The Oslo agreement had no mechanism to redress the continued Israeli encroachment in the Occupied Territories, or continuing human rights abuses by the Israeli government and military.
During the period from the start of the "peace process" in 1993 to May 2000, partial withdrawals by the Israeli military left the PA controlling about 40% of the West Bank and 65% of the Gaza Strip. Israel still controlled entry and exit to these areas.
Barak's 'generous offer'
In July 2000, PA President Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak met with US President Bill Clinton at Camp David, for what was intended to be the conclusion of the "peace process". At the meeting Barak proclaimed the Israeli government's non-negotiable points:
- There would be no return to pre-1967 borders.
- Israel would take no responsibility for the Palestinian refugees created in the 1948 and 1967 wars.
- East Jerusalem would remain under Israeli sovereignty.
- Israel would annex the territory covered by the Zionist settlements in the West Bank.
Arafat rejected these demands, acceptance of which would undermine even the most shallow facade of Palestinian self-national determination.
Barak's "generous" offer, the most substantial by any Israeli government, was fatally flawed: it offered to give a nation displaced and brutalised by decades of foreign oppression a fraction of the land they had originally inhabited. The failure of the Camp David negotiations meant that Barak's government faced a political crisis when he returned to Israel.
On September 28, 2000 the leader of the Israeli far-right Likud party, retired army general Ariel Sharon, visited the Noble Sanctuary (the Temple Mount), accompanied by 1000 armed guards. The visit came after the heated Camp David negotiations over the status of sites of religious significance in East Jerusalem.
Sharon is notorious for his responsibility for the slaughter of Palestinian refugees during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and for his call for East Jerusalem, containing sites of religious importance to Palestinians, to be under exclusive Israeli control.
His visit triggered mass Palestinian protests in Jerusalem, during which Israeli troops killed six unarmed protesters. The killings triggered further protests throughout the Occupied Territories, and among Arabs living within Israel — the beginning of the second intifada.
The immediate trigger was Sharon's obvious provocation, but the roots lay in increasing disaffection with the Oslo "peace process". The Palestinians had made concession after concession, but all they had seen in return was continuing construction of Zionist settlements, human rights abuses by the Israeli military and a refusal to address the basic issues involved in achieving an independent Palestinian state.
Sharon was elected as Israeli prime minister on February 6, 2001 on a platform of providing "security" for Israel — meaning, defeating the intifada.
Even if Sharon manages to crush the current uprising, more intifadas will follow. This is because the existence of the Israeli state is based on the continued dispossession of the Palestinian nation and the preservation of a state guaranteeing political supremacy for one religious group.
Origin of Israeli state
In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition the British ruled territory of Palestine. The original UN mandate for the partition of Palestine created two states, Israel controlling 56% of Palestinian territory and "Palestine", controlling the remaining portion.
The Zionist slogan of "a land without people, for a people without land" was used to justify the occupation of Palestinian land. This is a racist myth on an equal footing with Australia's colonial doctrine of "terra nullius" — the refusal to even acknowledge the existence of an indigenous population.
The State of Israel was established by the Zionist colonial-settler movement in 1948; an event known to Palestinians as al Naqba ("the Catastrophe") for good reason. The founding of Israel and its subsequent war with the neighbouring Arab countries displaced up to 750,000 Palestinians. The survivors and their descendants now live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories and neighbouring Arab countries.
Following the 1967 war, 90% of (original) Palestine was controlled by Israel.
Israel's existence as a Jewish state necessitates denial of the democratic right of return for Palestinian refugees, as acceptance of this right would mean that the current Jewish majority would be outnumbered by non-Jewish Palestinians. Worldwide there are currently around 3.7 million Palestinian refugees.
The racism inherent in the denial of Palestinian refugees' right to return to what is now Israel is highlighted by the fact that all Jewish people throughout the world — the overwhelming majority of whom are white First World citizens — are constitutionally accorded an automatic the right to settle within Israel.
The Palestinians living within Israel itself — are second-class citizens. For example, unlike adult non-Arab Israeli citizens, Palestinians are not conscripted into the Israeli military, denying them access to certain welfare benefits and jobs, and the right to lease homes or land controlled by government bodies. They are unable to lease land from the Jewish National Fund — which controls 94% of land in Israel.
The only immediate hope for any sort of peace will be the withdrawal of the Israeli military from the Occupied Territories and the dismantling of the Zionist settlements. But beyond this, only an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the right of return for Palestinian refugees to the territory now ruled over by the Israeli state, and a secularisation of that state, will begin to solve the continuing conflict in Palestine.
The violence occurring in Israel/Palestine is the result of the contradiction between the drive by the Israel to maintain its apartheid-like system and struggle by the Palestinians for the righting of the terrible historical injustice they continue to suffer. Without justice for the oppressed Palestinian nation, there will be no lasting peace.
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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