Thursday, March 28, 2024

Palestinians given little voice in American press

As the American media has once again openly sided with the forces of oppression and occupation, little room is given to the voices of the Palestinian people whose “Intifada” is an act of united national liberation against a brutal military occupation. Men, women and children are marching together, demanding the end of decades of brutality and occupation. This calls for some historical reflection.

While the Ottoman Empire crumbled, the nationalist leaders of the Arab world demanded both the removal of Ottoman rule as well as the independence of all Arab lands including Palestine. It was at this juncture that the Western colonial powers used Arab resentment against the Ottomans to seek alliances with the Arab nationalists against the Ottoman and German axis of World War I.

Preceded by the secretive 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between the British and French, which created two areas of influence, and the concoction of the so-called “mandates,” the League of Nations in 1920 “Balkanized” the Arab nation with the creation of Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Palestine and Iraq. This was basically meant to break the Arab nationalist movement, since its use to the colonial powers was over with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.

The Balfour Declaration, an exclusively Euro-American effort in 1918, gave the Jews of Europe the right to establish their homeland in Palestine. As the numbers of immigrant Jews grew by 1928, the exclusively European Jewish leadership had become more virulently anti-Arab. Political Zionism, a peculiar racist ideology, began to define the formation of the Jewish homeland. The Zionist movement worked in tandem with the colonial powers in the efforts to break Arab nationalism throughout this period.

Even at this crucial juncture in history, the Palestinian and Arab nationalists were ready to accept the presence of a Jewish minority in Palestine, under the laws of an independent Palestine. This of course suffered a serious setback when the Zionist leadership, along with American help, sought to undermine the legitimate demands of the Palestinian people and embarked on what can only be characterized as a racist genocide against the Arab people of Palestine with the disaster of 1948.

Israel was formed by the western countries after World War II with a contradictory purpose, to enable the Jewish people of Europe to recover some semblance of normalcy after the horrors of Nazi-German Holocaust. Simultaneously this was to be achieved by the large scale dispossession of Palestinians throughout Palestine. The latter was carried out by Israeli death squads, which engaged in some of the most horrific episodes of ethnic cleansing, as Palestinians were systematically massacred, pushed out of their lands and confined to refugee camps, prisons, or forcibly deported.

People like Yitzak Shamir and Ariel Sharon made careers in these death squads before putting on their civilian pretensions years later. Sharon is also held to be personally responsible for horrific massacres of thousands of unarmed men, women and children committed under his orders in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982 - a fact confirmed even by Israel’s own investigations. This is the same person who so arrogantly marched into the sacred Haram Al Sharif shrine with 2,000 soldiers, blatantly intending to provoke the resentment and anger of the subjugated Palestinian people. The current crisis is directly attributed to this provocative act by a hated racist war criminal, not an ordinary member of Israel’s parliament.

The Palestinian struggle is about a people systematically dispossessed and wronged by the armed might of a racist state and its powerful friends. Every liberation struggle in history has always been labeled “terrorist,” and “opposing peace,” yet we might ask, “What kind of peace?” It is obvious to the world that the so-called “peace talks” of Oslo were only meant to fool the Palestinian leadership into accepting terms that effectively demolish the Palestinian national question, offering the Palestinians a series of “Bantustans,” the infamous apartheid concept of relegating an entire population into camps controlled by an occupying military. Under such conditions, with the imposition of such false peace, the civilian population has rightly felt tremendous indignation and humiliation, as their legitimate demands are denied, and military occupation is the only solution offered by Israel. When the injustice of such a peace is pointed out, the Western media universally condemns such doubt as opposition to peace.

What I find particularly offensive is the fact that the Palestinian people’s legitimate demands for freedom are being treated as irrational and dangerous - the stone-throwing youth of Palestine are the children of the world, angry, hurt and no longer willing to live under conditions of slavery. The American media so hurtfully scorns this fact by pointing out in every way possible that Israeli armed forces have every right to use maximum military force against protesting youth armed with stones and the fire of freedom in their hearts.

Children are being killed every day by Israeli soldiers, and the world watched in horror as little Mohammed AlDurra was cruelly gunned down in cold blood in the arms of his father as they sought shelter from Israeli gunfire. Even the ambulance driver who rushed to help the child was shot dead by the Israeli soldiers. This is cold blooded murder of children and unarmed civilians. The Western press, however, likes to call this “crossfire.” Most of the gunshot wounds are to the head and chest area and a very large number of those being shot and killed are children.

Outspoken Israelis have also condemned some of the barbarities committed in the name of “security,” and “peace.” Israeli journalist Amira Haas, writing in the Oct. 18 edition of “Ha’aretz,” a leading Israeli newspaper, has openly condemned the excesses of the Israeli military. Violence is implicit in any relationship of oppression and to equate the stone-throwing youth with the armed might of the Israeli military is dangerously insane.

All in all, it is obvious to the world that what is going on in occupied Palestine is nothing short of a popular people’s uprising against half a century of brutal oppression.

Raja Harish Swamy, a State News guest columnist, can be reached at swamyraj@msu.edu.

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