Henry Siegman
Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center
August 2014
Executive summary
The slaughter of Palestinian civilians and the Dresden-like reduction to rubble
of large parts of
Gaza by Israel’s military forces in the name of its own citizens’ security has
exposed the hypocrisy
that lies at the heart of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians. Israel’s claim to
the right of
self-defence in order to prevent its victims’ emergence from under its
occupation is the ultimate
expression of chutzpa.
An occupying power is under two obligations in international law: to end the
occupation, and until
it does so, to protect the population under its occupation.
Israel is in blatant violation of both of these obligations. The security threats to
its own population
that it invokes to justify its assaults that regularly result in the killing of far
more Palestinian
non-combatants than militants are triggered by its occupation. Occupied
people who are told by
their occupier that their subjugation is permanent and that they will never be
allowed to exercise
the right to national self-determination and sovereign existence on territories
recognised by
the international community as their rightful patrimony have every right to
resort to resistance,
including violent resistance, to achieve their freedom if they are reacting to the
violence that is
keeping them illegally under occupation. It is a right exercised by the Jewish
people when their
own struggle for statehood was challenged.
The slaughter of Palestinian civilians and the Dresden-like
reduction to rubble of large parts of Gaza by Israel’s
military forces in the name of its own citizens’ security has
exposed the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of Israel’s
dealings with the Palestinians. Israel’s claim to the right of
self-defence in order to prevent its victims’ emergence
from under its occupation is the ultimate expression of
chutzpa.
Without entering the debate over whether the rocket
assaults on Israel from Gaza were precipitated in every
instance by Israel’s own violations of truces and ceasefire
accords it negotiated with Hamas, as documented by
various analysts (including Amira Hass, Peter Beinart,
Nathan Thrall, Sara Roy and others), Israel’s claim to
self-defence is based on a glaring falsehood.
An occupying power is under two obligations in international
law: to end the occupation, and until it does so, to
protect the population under its occupation.
Israel is in blatant violation of both of these obligations.
The security threats to its own population that it invokes to
justify its assaults that regularly result in the killing of far
more Palestinian non-combatants than militants are
triggered by its occupation. Occupied people who are told
by their occupier that their subjugation is permanent and
that they will never be allowed to exercise the right to
national self-determination and sovereign existence on
territories recognised by the international community as
their rightful patrimony have every right to resort to
resistance, including violent resistance, to achieve their
freedom, if they are reacting to the violence that is keeping
them illegally under occupation. It is a right exercised by
the Jewish people when their own struggle for statehood
was challenged.
This reality has certain clear policy implications for the
ceasefire discussions currently under way. Robert Serry,
the United Nations (UN) special coordinator for the Middle
East peace process, told the UN Security Council on August
18th that “The basic equation [in these negotiations] must
consist of ending the blockade on Gaza, and addressing
Israel’s legitimate security concerns”. These two “legitimate”
goals are utterly irreconcilable, unless the Israelis
are prepared to offer the Palestinians a guaranteed and
enforceable road to a two-state solution, in conformity with
the Road Map for Middle East Peace, to be implemented in
parallel with Gaza’s demilitarisation. If they cannot or will
not agree to this, there is no basis whatever for their
demand for Gaza’s demilitarisation, for Israel has no right
to expect Palestinians to acquiesce to the status quo as an
occupied people as their permanent destiny.
The war crimes committed by Israel’s armed forces during
its War of Independence have been documented by Benny
Morris in his book Righteous Victims, and more recently by
Ari Shavit in his book My Promised Land. Both argue that
because there would have been no Jewish state without
these crimes (an unproven and doubtful claim), they must
be accepted as a necessary evil. It is a dispensation that
neither author, nor Israelis in general, are prepared to
extend to Palestinians under Israel’s occupation who are
still struggling for their people’s independence and
statehood.
Too many Israelis seem to believe – indeed, to take absolutely
for granted – that they have a God-given right to
occupy, suppress, disenfranchise and displace non-Jews
– particularly Arabs – in Israel. This right seems to be
implied in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence that
Palestinians affirm the State of Israel as the historic
homeland of the Jewish people.
It is a belief that, by extension, also leads some Israeli
Jews to discredit and disenfranchise fellow Israeli Jews –
typically those of Israel’s political left, and NGO humanitarian
and civil rights activists – who criticise Israel’s behaviour
as deeply violative of democratic and humanitarian
norms. This is why there have been repeated efforts in
Israel’s Knesset to outlaw such NGOs.
It may also account for the fact that adherents to a Jewish
religious tradition that stresses the sanctity of human life
and man’s creation in the image of the divine react so
callously to the destruction of innocents as Israelis have,
80-90% of whom approved Israel’s killing and maiming of
so many of Gaza’s non-combatant population. It seems not
to occur to them that this sense of special entitlement that
characterises their behaviour resonates an ideology that
led to the Holocaust – even as they invoke the memory of
the Holocaust to justify measures they say are intended to
prevent its reoccurrence.
It also may explain why of all the democracies in the world,
Israel is probably the only one in which a member of its
parliament (the Knesset), Ayelet Shaked, who publicly
advocates the genocide of the residents of Gaza, has not
been expelled from her political party or from Israel’s
parliament, and whose deputy speaker of the Knesset,
Moshe Feiglin, is an advocate of ethnic cleansing.
If there was any doubt (there never should have been) that
Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government had no
intention of ever permitting Palestinians to realise their
right to statehood and self-determination, Netanyahu
personally dispelled it on July 11th 2014 in a press conference
in Hebrew, in which he declared he would never allow
Palestinians the right to genuine sovereignty, the one
element that defines statehood. As noted approvingly in the
Times of Israel by its editor, David Horovitz, “Nobody will
ever be able to claim in the future that [Netanyahu] didn’t
tell us what he really thinks. He made it explicitly clear that
he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian
state in the West Bank.”
Israel’s pretense that it is sincerely committed to a twostate
solution is repeatedly given the lie by the arbitrariness
and contrariness of its dealings with Palestinian
Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. In the more recent
months of their on-and-off relationship, Netanyahu treated
Abbas as a serious partner for peace as long as he was
willing to engage Israel in a phony peace process that
served no purpose other than to provide Netanyahu’s
government with cover for the continued expansion of
Israeli settlements, whose purpose, in turn, it is to prevent
a two-state solution.
When that deception became too obvious even for so
compliant a peace partner as Abbas and his colleagues,
who have been providing Palestinian security forces to
facilitate the continuation of Israel’s occupation, they
formed a unity government supported by Hamas. Abbas
was immediately denounced by Netanyahu as no longer a
partner for peace, and he accused him of having chosen
terror over peacemaking.
But now that Israel is faced with a rising wave of worldwide
the killing and destruction wrought by Israeli forces in Gaza
is being exposed, Netanyahu again finds it convenient to
describe Abbas as a peace partner who can be relied on by
Israel to serve as gatekeeper for the prison in which the
victims of Israel’s latest “grass-mowing” activities,1 both
living and dead, are interred.
1 During the July-August 2014 Gaza war Israeli security officials and pundits described such military campaigns as attempts to “mow
the grass”, meaning a repeated
action needed to maintain the status quo.
3
Noref Expert Analysis – August 2014
His vision is not much different to that of Naftali Bennett,
who heads the ultra-nationalist, religious Habayit Hayehudi.
He is counting on the Palestinians’ and the international
community’s frustration and despair over a two-state
outcome to allow Israel to proceed with unilateral measures
that create disconnected Palestinian enclaves and the
annexation to Israel of much of the West Bank. It is an
arrangement, he believes, that would enable Israel to
escape the stain of apartheid by granting nominal “full
citizenship” to the few Palestinians remaining in the areas
annexed to Israel.
But he is mistaken; it will not happen. Too many Palestinian
mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters have seen
their loved ones killed and injured to allow Israel to escape
the consequences of its ethnic cleansing and the resulting
apartheid.
In the New York Times of August 13th, Isabel Kershner
reports that Netanyahu has dropped his condemnations of
the new Palestinian government of reconciliation. Udi
Dekel, a former lead Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians,
said that most of the Israeli government now supports
the idea of “turning the reconciliation inside out”. Yair
Lapid, Israel’s finance minister and a leader of the government’s
second-largest party, Yesh Atid, and other centrist
ministers have been reported as putting forward plans “for
an ambitious new order”. Some believe that the negotiations
for a truce could lead to peace talks that produce a
two-state accord.
Of course, an opening for a two-state accord is the very last
thing Netanyahu is seeking. He has devoted his entire
political life to preventing such an accord, and probably
believes it is a goal that this latest war in Gaza may finally
have achieved.
Henry Siegman is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He
served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a
non-resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle
East Programme, School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish
Congress.
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of view are those of the author and do not reflect those of the
organisation for which he works or NOREF. NOREF does not
give any warranties, either expressed or implied, concerning the
content.
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