[Reader-list] FW: [ePalestine] No Other Option?! (By Sam Bahour)

[francesca recchia]

No Other Option?! 
By Sam Bahour  


I
watch in shock, like the rest of the world, at the appalling death and
destruction being wrought on Gaza by Israel; and still it does not
stop. Meanwhile, we see a seemingly never- ending army of well-prepared
Israeli war propagandists, some Israeli government officials, and many
other people self-enlisted for the purpose, explaining to the world the
justifications for pulverizing the Gaza Strip, with its 1.5 million
inhabitants. Curious about how Israel, or any society for that matter,
could justify a crime of such magnitude against humanity, I turned to
my Jewish Israeli friends today to hear their take on things.  One
after another, the theme was the same. The vast majority of Jewish
Israelis has apparently bought into the state- sponsored line that
Israel was under attack and had no other option available to stop
Hamas’ rockets.  More frightening is the revelation that many
Israelis—including one person who self- identifies as a "leftist"—are
speaking of accepting the killing of 100,000 or more Palestinians, if
need be.   


I have a problem with this logic.  


I
am a Palestinian American based in Al-Bireh, the sister city of
Ramallah in the West Bank. I can see how an observer from abroad could
be blind to the facts, given the blitz of Gaza war propaganda
orchestrated by the Israeli military.  But I know better. Like all
other Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, I am not an observer from
abroad.  We live every day under the bitter burden of Israeli military
occupation and we know that this question, presented as rhetorical—did
we really have an option? —has a rational answer. Allow me, from my
vantage point as an economic development professional, to touch on some
of the other options that could have been chosen.  Moreover, many of
them will be forced on Israel anyway, sooner or later, whether after
the next “war,” or in the coming days under the ceasefire agreement and
the Egyptian-sponsored implementation mechanism being discussed as I
write this. Meaning: all this death and destruction could have been
easily avoided.  


Dear Israeli citizen, short of ending the occupation, you could have:  


1.         Opted
to agree on how to disagree: There are two bodies of law that deal with
international relations in this world, International Law and the Law of
the Jungle.  Until today, your government—and maybe you—refuse to
accept the global consensus that the Gaza Strip and West Bank,
including East Jerusalem, are all militarily occupied territory.  The
occupying power is Israel—as attested in dozens of United Nations
resolutions over the past four decades.  By ignoring this fact that
Israel is an occupying power, thus removing (unsuccessfully, of course)
any internationally recognized baseline for the conflict, you have
created an environment that can only be described as the “Law of the
Jungle,” where might is right and where, as we see in Gaza now,
anything goes. You could have accepted international humanitarian law,
as stipulated in the Fourth Geneva Conventions regulating occupations,
and avoided many of the seemingly impossible positions you find
yourself in today: from the albatross of the settlement enterprise to
the reality of missile attacks from the Gaza Strip.  


2.         Opted
to allow for an international presence in the occupied territory: For
over 30 years – yes, 30 years! – the Palestinians have begged the
international community to create and maintain a serious presence in
the occupied territory, something to stand between us and protect the
civilians on both sides.  Israel repeatedly refused to consider this. 
Instead your government chose to deal with the Palestinian territory as
if it was its own, always behaving in line with its meta-objective:
getting a maximum of Palestinian geography with a minimum of
Palestinian demography. You could have avoided dealing directly with
the natural reaction of any occupied people to resist their occupation,
by allowing international players to get involved and serve as a sort
of referee between you and those you are occupying militarily.  


3.         Opted
to accept lawful non-violent resistance to your occupation:  For over
40 years, Palestinians have tried everything to remove the Israeli boot
of occupation from our necks (all documented, for anyone interested
enough to do the research): tax revolts, general strikes, civil
disobedience, economic development, elections, and on and on.  Your
response every time was to rely on violence, on control; your message
was that you respect nothing other than your own desires.  Your
children on the front line in Gaza may be too young to recall, but you
might remind them, so that they will at least be informed as they march
ahead to your drummers: Let them know you deported duly elected mayors
back in the 1980s; let them know that you closed down entire
Palestinian universities for years on end; let them know that you have
imprisoned over 650,000 Palestinians since your occupation began,
creating a virtual prison university for the resistance movement and
stunning any possibility for a new leadership to arise; let them know
that even after Oslo you prohibit, to this day, Palestinians from
building fully independent utilities—not only in Gaza, but in the West
Bank as well.  You could have tried a little harder to understand that
people under occupation do not throw flowers and rice at their
occupiers and resolve to surrender to a slow death.   


4.         Opted
to accept the results of Palestinian democracy:  For Palestinians, and
believe it or not Israelis too, the best thing that happened in the
recent past was when Hamas was chosen in peaceful elections to take
over the governance of Palestine.   Prior to those elections, where was
Hamas?  They were in their underground bunkers carrying out atrocities
that were disrupting your daily agenda—and mine—with absolutely no
accountability whatsoever.  When they accepted the Oslo process and ran
for office and were duly elected, they stopped, for all intent and
purpose, attacking inside Israel (by which I mean, inside the Green
Line). Your citizens become significantly safer! Your government (and
the U.S.) responded by refusing to accept the results of our elections
and imposed sanctions on the elected Palestinian government. This was
long before any violent infighting took place in Gaza between Hamas and
Fatah.  How did the Palestinians react to your intransigence?  They
pressed Hamas to replace its Hamas-only government with a unity
government that had all the significant Palestinian political factions
represented. You were thus presented with an accountable body that
encompassed all Palestinian political flavors. Your government again
responded by refusing to accept the results of our elections and
continued with sanctions against the Palestinian government, repeating
over and over the mantra that “there is no partner.”  Beyond that, the
Israeli government intensified its campaign of assassinating and
arresting Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and introduced a whole
new range of draconian punitive measures against the Palestinian public
at large. Like what, you ask? Well, one such measure was that your
government began blocking foreign nationals—people like me—from
entering or doing business in the occupied territory, thus hindering
any real chance to create a new, forward-looking reality.  You could
have accepted Palestinian democracy instead of propping up your own
version of a failed Palestinian leadership.  


5.         Opted
not to interfere in Palestinian internal politics: When Hamas violently
struck at Fatah in Gaza—for reasons that have been well documented
elsewhere—your government chose to punish all 1.5 million Palestinians
by installing a hermetic seal on Gaza and allowing only a trickle of
normal traffic to go in or out, meeting only a small fraction of Gaza's
needs. Lest you suspect me of indulging in empty clichés, I shall
explain.  International agencies have estimated that Gaza’s daily basic
needs amount to 450 truckloads a day.  For 18 months prior to your
aggression on Gaza, your government allowed 70 truckloads a day on
average. Yes, seventy!  And these were allowed to enter only when the
border crossings that you control were open, which was only 30% of the
time.  You could have chosen not to use food, medicine, education,
cement, water, electricity, and so forth, as tools of repression.  If
you saw yourselves accurately as the occupying power you are, you could
have kept in place a lawful security regime on the borders without
creating a humanitarian disaster which led to irrational acts (such as
missiles being lobbed over the border) by those you tried to starve
into submission.  You could have made a firm distinction between your
political desires and your humanitarian obligations as an occupying
power.  


This list could go on and on.  


The
fact of the matter is that you had a long list of options open to you!
So many, indeed, that it boggles the mind that your government has
apparently been able to blind you to all of them…so that today, as the
bombs shriek over Gaza, you can say, and evidently sincerely mean it:
We had no other option.  


Nevertheless,
even with all these options effectively invisible to you, there is
nothing on this earth—not law, not politics, not even a desperate and
lengthy campaign of rockets creating widespread fear and even some
civilian deaths on your side of the border—there is nothing that can
justify, by Israel or any other country on this earth, the decision to
opt for a crime against humanity as your chosen response. Nothing!  


You
accepted your government’s path to separate unilaterally from occupied
Palestinians; you accepted an illegal barrier to be built on
confiscated Palestinian lands; you accepted a unilateral disengagement
that simply redeployed your occupation from the heart of Gaza to its
perimeter, on land and sea and in the air, rather than actually
removing it; you accepted the continuing expansion of your settlements
and their systematic harassment of their Palestinian neighbors while
talking peace; you accepted, and sadly continue to accept, a consensual
blindness to the fact that the majority of Palestinians live as
refugees, far from your occupation (practically, not geographically),
and feel much more rage than you have lately been creating in the Gaza
Strip.  I urge you to stop acquiescing in this policy of managed
unreality. I urge you to open your eyes and wake up. If not for our
sake, then for your own.   


You
may not see us over the Separation Wall you built; you may not see us
from the cockpits of your F-16s or from the inside of your tanks; you
may not see us from the command and control center in the heart of Tel
Aviv as you direct your pilots to launch their ton of munitions over
our heads. Still, I can assure you of one thing. Until you wake up and
demand that your leaders choose a different path, a path toward a life
as equals and neighbors instead of trampler-on and trampled-on, you and
your warrior sons and daughters will continue to see us—all of us,
living and dead—in your nightmares, where we will continue to demand
peace with justice.  


Sam Bahour is a management consultant and entrepreneur living in Ramallah; he is co-editor of “Homeland: Oral History of Palestine and Palestinians,” and blogs at epalestine.blogspot.com.