CounterCurrents.org
March 12 2009
Israel-Palestine Conflict 101:
Taking Off The Blinders In The U.S.
By A.M. Khan
12 March, 2009
Countercurrents.org
`There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz but was
that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have
come here and stolen their country.’
–David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of Israel and the first Prime Minister
Now that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is off the front page and the
Gazans are left to deal with the aftermath outside of world media
attention, it makes sense to step back and review how the
Israel-Palestine conflict is depicted in U.S. mainstream media. This
depiction shapes how the U.S. public views the recent events in
Gaza. It also shapes how the public understands what constitutes a
just resolution to the conflict.
The nature of U.S. mainstream media coverage of events in Gaza and of
the Israel-Palestine conflict renders Americans grossly
misinformed. U.S. media representations are largely absent of
historical context and omit the fact that for decades Israel has
committed human rights violations against the Palestinian people and
occupied their land. The media lens in mainstream U.S. coverage (print
and television) obscures core issues and creates a false framework of
the conflict. In the U.S., the Israel-Palestine conflict is framed as
`a cycle of violence’ between two adversaries of equal power engaged
since millennia in a conflict based on religious and ethnic
difference. Not a single element of this frame is true.
Myth Number 1: The conflict has been ongoing since millennia.
The conflict is less than 100 years old. Before 1900, Jews,
Christians, and Muslims lived together in the Holy Land mostly
peacefully in a quiet agrarian society. While some European Jews
immigrated in the late 1800’s to what was then Ottoman
Empire-controlled Palestine, their numbers were small. In 1917, as
World War I was coming to a close, the British government became the
colonial power in control of historic Palestine (the area known today
as Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip). With the 1918 `Balfour
Declaration’ the British made clear their support for a Jewish state
in Palestine. After 1918, immigration of European Jews to Palestine
escalated, increasing each year as time wore on. Many of these new
immigrants were in flight from anti-Semitism in Europe.
As the Nazis came to power in Germany in the early 1930’s and began
their oppression and later genocide of European Jews, the numbers of
European Jewish immigrants to Palestine increased
dramatically. Through these early decades of the 20th century, between
the British commitment to creating a Jewish state in Palestine and as
more European Jews flooded in, tensions between the European newcomers
and the native Palestinian Arabs began and increased over time. After
the genocide and near annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis
during World War II, the movement to make a Jewish homeland in
Historic Palestine found understandable sympathy. The fly in the
ointment was the fact that another people already lived in that land.
In 1948 the state of Israel was established by these European Jewish
immigrants, adherents of an ideology called `Zionism.’ There were
different opinions among Zionist leaders as to how to deal with the
native Palestinian Arabs. Some advocated peaceful co-existence and
others advocated dispossession and expulsion. There were also
positions in between. In the end, the more regressive positions
prevailed. In their writings, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion,
the first Prime Minister of Israel, were explicit and unapologetic
about their aim to expel the native Palestinian Arabs and take their
land.
The 1948 nation building of Israel was premised on dispossession of
the natives, including a premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing and
massacre. In 1948, Zionist military forces expelled about 750,000
Palestinians from 78% of Historic Palestine into the West Bank, Gaza
Strip, and exile abroad. After statehood, these Zionist forces became
the Israeli army. In 1967, again through military means, Israel took
control of the remaining 22% of historic Palestine (i.e., the West
Bank and Gaza Strip). The Palestinians driven into the West Bank and
Gaza Strip in 1948 (as well as those already there) came under Israeli
military occupation in 1967, where they remain today 41 years
later. Thus, in 1948 Israel proper was created on 78% of historic
Palestine and since 1967 Israel has occupied the remaining 22% of
historic Palestine.
Myth Number 2: The conflict is a cycle of violence between adversaries
of similar power
The Israel-Palestine conflict is between two parties vastly unequal in
power. Israel, the nuclear-armed occupier, has the fourth most
powerful army in the world and cutting edge military weaponry. The
Palestinians, an occupied and stateless people, are largely
unarmed. The Palestinians have no army, no air force, no planes, no
tanks, no gunships, and no nuclear weapons. This is why we see
pictures of Palestinians throwing stones at tanks. If you possessed
anything more powerful, would a stone really be your weapon of choice
against a tank?
Myth Number 3: The conflict is based on religious and ethnic
differences
The Israel-Palestine conflict is about possession and control of a
small piece of land approximately the size of New Jersey. Israel
believes itself entitled to all of the land because in the Bible God
promised all of historic Palestine to the Jews. Since 1967, in
violation of international law, Israel has moved 500,000 of its
citizens into the West Bank. These settlers are connected to Israel
through Jewish-only roads that crisscross the West Bank. Palestinians
are not allowed to use these roads and must take circuitous routes on
older roads in order to go around Israeli settlements, often adding
hours to their journeys.
Regarding the `peace process,’ Israel’s talk of making peace has been
a rhetorical screen. Behind this screen each and every Israeli
government since 1967,whether its flavor was left, right, or center,
has continued the campaign begun in 1948, of land grab, human rights
violations, and imprisonment of the Palestinians into multiple
separate enclaves within the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. Since 1967 every Israeli government has continued a
national construction project (based on a plan created in the late
1960’s by Labor Minister Yigal Allon)to separate, isolate, and enclose
every Palestinian city and most towns and villages by surrounding them
with Israeli settlements. Today, that project is essentially
complete. In addition to the settlement building, Israel’s
construction of the Wall (86% of which is in the West Bank rather than
along the 1967 border) and ongoing annexation of land and water
resources have created facts on the ground establishing Israel’s
dominance over all of historic Palestine. Today, Israel’s mission of
total dominance is near completion.
In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization (as representative of
the Palestinian people) agreed to recognize Israel, forego claim to
100% of historic Palestine, and accept a nation on 22% of their
original land (i.e., on the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Israel has
never agreed to this. Israel has made clear that it wants a future
Palestinian state to be a version of 80% of 22% of 100%. Such a
`state’ would be a non-contiguous series of disconnected
cantons. Israel’s Wall cuts deep into the West Bank and incorporates
into Israel West Bank settlements and aquifers. This is the desert
after all, and water is treasure. The Wall and settlements segment the
West Bank and make a contiguous Palestinian state unlikely, if not
impossible. Israel also wants control over exit and entry from that
80% of 22% of 100%. An analogy for this: imagine that in each of the
rooms of your house you can do as you wish but that someone with guns
controls all the hallways between the rooms. Is this a viable
structure for life?
What holds all this in place and allows it to continue is that Israel
has the multibillion dollar per year financial support and diplomatic
cover of the most powerful nation in history, the United States. The
U.S. has agreed to provide Israel with $30 billion dollars in military
aid over the next 10 years and has provided billions upon billions of
dollars in aid to Israel in the past. For decades, Israel has been the
largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid and receives one-third of the
total U.S. foreign aid budget. The U.S., a veto-wielding member of the
United Nations Security Council, has also vetoed each and every
resolution put forward by the United Nations in response to Israel’s
multiple violations of international law. In each of the U.N. votes on
these resolutions against Israeli government actions, year after year,
the U.S. and Israel (and a few small Pacific Island nations) stand
alone against the rest of the international community in siding with
Israel against international law and world opinion.
All of the facts above are available from easily accessible public
sources. The facts are not in dispute. However, they have been
obscured by a web of misinformation that hides the truth. Because the
facts are what they are, when Israel is criticized, its proponents,
who cannot rely on facts to support their cause, resort to personal
attacks and charges of `anti-Semitism.’ Their charges of anti-Semitism
presuppose that all criticism of Israel as a state actor and all
efforts to hold Israel, which is after all a nation state like any
other, accountable for its actions are inherently anti-Semitic. When
the truth cannot be bent to their narrative, proponents of Israeli
government actions, no matter what those actions are, resort to the
cudgel of anti-Semitism to silence and censor criticism of the actions
of the state of Israel. So far, this method of silencing critics has
proven highly effective in the U.S. Publicly criticizing Israel has
cost academics their jobs and members of congress political
office. These examples keep the rest of us in line as well.
Decades of misinformation and a mythical story (i.e., a land without a
people for a people without a land), as well as the daily falsehoods
we continue to be fed, can make the situation in Israel-Palestine seem
more murky, complicated, and relativistic than it actually is.
When the American colonists were dispossessing the Native Americans,
there was violent resistance. A people being dispossessed will
resist. They resist because of their dispossession (not because they
are crazy, evil, or filled with hate because of their religion). And,
of course, violent native resistance hurts the occupier and harms
innocents. However, when the occupier casts itself as the victim and
says it is acting only in `self-defense’ against native `attack’, it
has turned logic on its head. Israel’s propaganda campaign over the
last 41 years, casting itself as the only and perpetual victim, has
been extremely successful in making this bizarre topsy-turvy spin seem
logical and correct. It is yet another example of the effectiveness of
saying the same thing over and over again until people start believing
it is true.
There are many situations in history where two opposing perspectives
are not of equal moral weight. The colonial campaign China continues
in Tibet, the former British Empire’s actions around the globe, the
apartheid system in South Africa, Belgium’s enslavement and killing of
10 million Congolese for natural resources, the genocide of the Jews
by the Nazis, the genocide of the Armenians by Turkey all come to
mind. The moral equation in Israel-Palestine is as simple and clear.
While discussion of U.S. national interest and geopolitical strategy
take up much space in newspapers and conversation among the pundit
class, the dimension of morality, the concern with doing the right
thing, rarely enters our public discourse. In the end, the situation
in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank calls on our
moral sense. It calls on our humanity, compassion, and sense of
fairness. Our silence and complicity in Israel’s dispossession of the
Palestinians and its ongoing human rights abuses over decades is a
moral lapse of huge proportion.
Americans have a larger stake in this issue than citizens of other
countries because we foot the bill to the tune of $8 million a day in
aid to Israel. All of us who pay U.S. income taxes funded the recent
atrocities in Gaza. We paid to drop white phosphorus on civilians. We
paid to level homes, clinics, and schools. We paid to kill children
and whole families as they slept in their beds. We are complicit in
the bloodbath in Gaza. We are complicit in children starving to death
laying next to their dead mothers buried in rubble as the
International Red Cross documented in Gaza. We fund acts of state
terror in which people watch their beloved daughter, son, father,
mother be literally torn apart. We pay for a military machine that
maims, kills, and holds captive an unarmed civilian population of men,
women, and children, enclosing them in prison-like cantons within the
West Bank and Gaza. For decades, we have been paying for the slow
annihilation of a society and people who have done absolutely nothing
to us.
So what can we do as individual citizens? Call your congresspeople to
demand an even-handed U.S. policy in Israel-Palestine. Call the Obama
White House to do the same. Learn about the growing Boycott,
Divestment, Sanctions campaign against Israel (modeled on the
anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa). Don’t buy Israeli
products. Tell your local grocer you won’t shop there until they stop
carrying Israeli products. Educate your neighbor. Educate
yourself. Watch the documentary film `Occupation 101.’ Read `The
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Read
the writings of Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Rashid
Khalidi. Go to to find a political group in
your area working for justice in Israel-Palestine. Most of all, do
something. Do not be silent. Do not be complicit.
A.M. Khan, Ph.D. is an Indian American neuropsychologist by day and an
activist and beginning documentary filmmaker by night. She welcomes
correspondence on her work and can be reached at: [email protected].
http://www.countercurrents.o rg/khan120309.htm