Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 4 January 2009
One is often baffled by the ironies of international relations and the alliances they foster. Take for example the Israeli colonial settlement that had declared war on the Palestinian people and several Arab countries since its inception while at the same time it built alliances with many Arab regimes and with Palestinian leaders.
While Hashemite-Zionist relations and Maronite Church-Zionist relations have always been known and documented, there has been less documentation of the services that Israel has provided and continues to provide to Arab regimes over the decades. It is now recognized that Israel's 1967 invasion of Egypt aimed successfully to destroy Gamal Abdul-Nasser, the enemy of all US dictatorial allies among the Arab regimes, whom the US and before it Britain and France had tried to topple since the 1950s but failed. Israel thus rendered a great service to Arab monarchies (and a few republics) from "the ocean to the Gulf," whose survival was threatened by Nasser and Nasserism. Israel's subsequent intervention in Jordan in 1970 to help the Jordanian army destroy Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas and its final crushing of that organization in its massive invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 were also important services it rendered to these same regimes threatened by the PLO's "revolutionary" potential and its sometimes recalcitrant positions. Israeli intelligence has also provided over the decades crucial information to several Arab regimes enabling them to crush their political opposition and strengthen their dictatorial rule. Prominent examples among recipients of Israeli intelligence largesse include the Moroccan and the Omani dictatorships.
Israel's services to Arab regimes continue apace. Its 2006 invasion of Lebanon, engineered to destroy Hizballah, was cheered by Arab regimes and neoliberal Arab intellectuals hostile to Hizballah and employed exclusively by Saudi media outlets. Though the massive Israeli destruction of southern Lebanon and south Beirut and the massacres of more than a thousand Lebanese strengthened Hizballah and weakened Israel's military standing, the invasion was much appreciated by Israel's Arab allies. Indeed since 2006, Israel's Arab regime allies as well as neoliberal Arab intellectuals have been openly calling on it to neutralize the so-called Iranian "threat" for its own sake and at their behest as well. The US has seen this as an opportune moment to fully integrate Israel in the region, so much so that it signaled to its Gulf allies to make proposals for a new regional alliance that includes Israel in its midst. The Bahraini foreign minister suggested a few weeks ago that Israel join the Arab League. Many such proposals have already been made in the past few months welcoming the colonial settlement to the regional alliance against Iran.
Since 2006, Arab regimes, neoliberal Arab intellectuals, as well as the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority (PCA) in Ramallah have reached an understanding that only Israel will be able to save them from Hizballah and Hamas, both organizations constituting a threat to the open alliance Arab regimes have with the US and Israel against Iran and all progressive forces in the region. These were not closely guarded secret hopes, but strategies that were openly discussed in private meetings, which often spilled into the public realm. The discussions in the Arab media and the declarations made by Israeli officials in the context of the ongoing Israeli massacres of the one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza in the last 10 days have left little to the imagination. A veritable open alliance now exists between the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority, Arab regimes, and Israel with the support of neoliberal Arab intellectuals, wherein Israel is subcontracted to decimate the Hamas government -- the only democratically elected government in the entire Arab world.
Here let us remember that Hamas was democratically elected in free elections and that its elected officials and members of parliament were kidnapped by the Israeli occupation and have been languishing in Israeli jails for years, and that the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority set their offices on fire, staged strikes against them, and signaled the PCA bureaucracy not to follow their orders. It was after all this failed to dislodge Hamas from power that the US, Israel, and the PCA staged a coup to massacre Hamas leaders in Gaza that backfired on them. The carnage unleashed by Israel in the last 10 days is the latest attempt by Israel to ensure that all Arabs and all Palestinians are ruled by dictators and never by democratically elected officials.
Many are wondering how the Arab regimes and the PCA can be so brazen in their "treachery" of the Palestinians. "Don't they fear being overthrown by the people?" is an oft-repeated question. The answer of course is a resounding "no." It is true that collaboration with Israel by Arab regimes is not new, and that what is new is merely their openness about it, but there is a perfectly good reason for this. In the 1940s and the 1950s, these regimes could not declare openly their alliance with Israel, as there were popular and international forces that would have removed them from power had they done so. Indeed, some at the time flirted with alliances that unofficially included Israel, like the Baghdad Pact, but they paid a heavy price for such collaboration. The Cold War, Third World revolutionism, Arab nationalism, the Soviet Union, China, Nasser, were all factors to be considered. While a few of these factors had remained when Egypt's Sadat declared his open alliance with the US and Israel in the late 1970s, none of these factors remains today. The US, Israel, and their major Arab allies have neutralized these forces one by one since 1967, opening the way for this brazen alliance between Israel and the Arab dictatorships, all of which are in the service of US interests in the region. These Arab regimes rule by terror and fear and have at their disposal the best secret police and repressive security apparatus that the US can train and equip and which oil money and US aid can buy.
When Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was asked point blank by al-Jazeera's anchorman if Israel had an arrangement with Arab regimes to commit the Gaza massacres, she refused to answer and finally denied such an arrangement existed but could not help but affirm that there are those in the Arab world who "think" as Israel does and that Hamas is their enemy as it is the enemy of Israel. This is, incidentally, the same Tzipi Livni, who only a few weeks ago informed Palestinian citizens of Israel that she has slated them for denationalization and deportation to the Palestinian Bantustans once Israel and the international community grants these West Bank prisons the status of an independent Palestinian state enclosed within the apartheid wall. After her war on Palestinians in Gaza started last week, Livni declared that her war against the Palestinian people is not only about security but also about Israel's "values" which non-collaborator Palestinians (unlike the PCA) do not share. Livni is of course right. Unlike Livni and the Israeli leadership, whose ethnic-cleansing ideals and plans are to make Israel a purely Jewish state that is Palästinenser-rein, most Palestinians believe that they should remain present on their lands even and especially if this sullies the purity of a Jewish Israel.
Livni has also asserted that Israel's values are shared by the "free world" and by unfree Arab regimes that are allies of the "free world." We can add, that her values are also shared by Saudi-funded neoliberal Arab intellectuals and by the leadership of the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority ensconced in the Green Zone of Ramallah. The civilized values of Israel are not unlike those espoused by the US in its ongoing wars against Arabs and Muslims, and are very much like European colonial values during the high age of colonialism and beyond. Livni and the Israeli leadership speak of human rights, democracy, peace, and justice as universal while applying them only to Jews and denying them especially to Palestinians. This is hardly an Israeli ruse. Let us remember the undying words of Frantz Fanon in this regard: "leave this Europe where they never tire of talking of man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe."
On the Palestinian front, the term of chief Palestinian collaborator and coup leader Mahmoud Abbas ends on 9 January. Israel hopes to extend his collaborationist rule as head of the PCA it set up through the Oslo agreement in 1993. As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands, world powers are cheering on. This is hardly a new development. It happens often in the context of other populations being murdered by allies of the US and Europe, and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding. On 19 April 1943, Britain and the US met in Bermuda, presumably to discuss the situation of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. That was also the day when the Nazis had launched their war against the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto but were met with unexpected courageous resistance. Little came out of the Bermuda Conference and the ongoing war against the Warsaw Ghetto proceeded uninterrupted. The Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto executed Jewish collaborators with the Nazis and bravely faced up to the Nazi army with what little weapons it had before being massacred. Their uprising was always inspirational to the Palestinians. In the heyday of the PLO as a symbol of Palestinian liberation, the organization would lay flower wreathes at the Warsaw Ghetto monument to honor these fallen Jewish heroes.
Szmul Zygielbojm was the leader of the Jewish socialist party, the Bund, in Poland and was part of the resistance against the Nazi invasion in 1939. He would later become a hostage held by the Nazis but would later be released and made a member of the Jewish council or judenrat, the Nazi equivalent of the Israeli-created Palestinian Collaborationist Authority, and which was charged with building a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Zygielbojm opposed the Nazi order and fled to Belgium, France, the US, and in 1942 ended up in London where he joined the Polish government in exile. On 12 May 1943, after he received word that the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto was finally crushed and many of its fighters killed, Zygielbojm turned on the gas in his London flat and committed suicide in protest against the indifference and inaction of the Allies to the plight of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. He also felt that he had no right to live after his comrades were killed resisting the Nazis. In his suicide letter, Zygielbojm insisted that while the Nazis were responsible for the murder of the Polish Jews, the Allies, through their inaction, were also guilty:
The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.The Palestinian Collaborationist Authority that runs the judenrat set up by Oslo has never even attempted to resist Israeli orders. Not one member of the top leadership decided to resign and not serve. Mahmoud Abbas, having provided so many dishonorable services to Israel, lacks Zygielbojm's integrity and noble principles and would never follow in Zygielbojm's footsteps.
The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions, tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility ...
I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave.
By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people ...
Meanwhile, the Palestinian people will resist the invading Israelis with all their might and against astronomical odds. The Palestinian people, like Zygielbojm before them, understand very well that Abbas, his clique, the Arab regimes, the US and Europe are all culpable in their slaughter as much as Israel is. In the case of Zygielbojm, he blamed world powers for their indifference and inaction, in the Palestinian case, world and regional powers are co-conspirators and active partners in crime.
The crushing of the Gaza Ghetto Uprising and the slaughter of its defenseless population will be relatively an easy task for the giant Israeli military machine and Israel's sadistic political leadership. It is dealing with the aftermath of a strengthened Palestinian determination to continue to resist Israel that will prove much more difficult for Israel and its Arab allies to deal with. While the thousands of dead and injured Palestinians are the main victims of this latest Israeli terrorist war, the major political loser in all this will be Abbas and his clique of collaborators. The test for Palestinian resistance now is to continue to refuse to grant Israel the right to conquer populations, to steal their land, to destroy their livelihoods, to imprison them in ghettos, and to starve them without being resisted.
The only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century of Zionist atrocities has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing them from the face of the earth. While Zionism sought and recruited Arab and Palestinian collaborators since its inception in the hope of crushing Palestinian resistance, neither Israel nor any of its collaborators has been able to stop it. The lesson that Zionism has refused to learn, and still refuses to learn, is that the Palestinian yearning for freedom from the Zionist yoke cannot be extinguished no matter how barbaric Israel's crimes become. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.
Joseph Massad is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York.
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS CONCERNING THE GAZA HOLOCAUST
January 4, 2009 at 4:43 pm (Associate Post, Ethnic Cleansing, Gaza, Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, War Crimes)
“This is a translation of an Arabic interview with the author” By Khalid Amayreh
Question: Israel says it is only defending itself against recurrent attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian “terrorist” organizations?
Answer: All aggressors say they are only defending themselves. Nazi Germany said it was defending itself. Israel is the last country in the world that is fit to complain about terrorism. After all, Israel represents, encapsulates and embodies terror in its ugliest and most nefarious forms.
Indeed, from the very inception of its misbegotten birth, Israel has been a mass murderer, a child killer, a land thief and an irredeemable liar.
The genocidal rampage Israel is carrying out in Gaza represents the norm rather than the exception as far Israeli behaviors are concerned. In the final analysis, one can safely claim that Israel’s entire history has been an uninterrupted chain of massacres and terror. What makes the present mini-holocaust in Gaza look especially gruesome is the live television coverage from the field. This didn’t exist in 1984 and the few subsequent years when Judeo-Nazis thugs committed numerous even more heinous massacres against the native Palestinians.
As to the current criminal onslaught, it is amply clear for those who value the truth that Israel is fully responsible for this huge crime against humanity. Ever since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel has been blockading and besieging the Gaza Strip, pushing the region’s estimated 1.5 million Palestinians to the edge of physical extermination. In brief, Israel imposed two alternatives on Palestinians, either to live a dog’s life and die quietly of starvation as a result of the Nazi-like siege, or be exterminated by the Israeli war machine.
Question: Israel claims it doesn’t deliberately target Palestinian civilians. How would you respond to that?
Answer: As an essentially criminal state which murders children and bomb apartment buildings, killing and maiming thousands of innocent children, Israel feels it has to lie to cover up her crimes. Criminality and mendacity are two sides of the same coin.
To put it simply, the Israeli claim is a pornographic lie, which unfortunately is constantly echoed by much of the western media. And there is a great deal of cynicism here because these lies are echoed while the Israeli army, air force and navy are seen raining death on apartment buildings, mosques, drug stores, private homes, college buildings including dormitories, shopping centers, petrol stations, schools, and police stations.
You see, it is a no-holds-barred approach, very much like the Nazis behaved during the Second World War.
Question: But Israel says it doesn’t kill Palestinian l civilians deliberately like the Palestinians do.
Answer: Well, first of all, whatever modest and primitive means of resistance the Palestinians possess don’t pose a real strategic threat to nuclear-armed Israel. The Palestinian projectiles fired from Gaza should only be seen as a desperate outcry by a people who are being exterminated by the Israeli war machine. Certainly, these homemade projectiles are no match for the state-of-the-art of the American technology of death such as the F-16 Jet fighter, the Bunker Busters, and the Abrams tanks which Israel is using to wreak death and havoc on unprotected Gaza and its defenseless civilians.
Second, Israel doesn’t tell the truth when it claims it doesn’t target civilians. Mistakes happen once, twice, even ten times. However, when thousands of innocent civilians, including entire families, are murdered in indiscriminate aerial bombing, it means the killing of civilians is deliberate. After all, killing knowingly is killing deliberately. And it doesn’t matter if you call it collateral damage or use other euphemisms in reference to the killings.
Besides, when the number of innocent victims is so high and so disproportionate as is the case in Gaza now, even intent becomes irrelevant.
Question: Israel says that Hamas hides weapons inside mosques?
Answer: Israel is saying many things to justify its genocidal wars against the Palestinian people. Last week, the Israeli air force bombed a small truck it said was carrying rockets. However, it turned out, as the Israeli Human Rights group B’tselem pointed out, that the truck was carrying cooking gas canisters.
Besides, are weapons stored in mosques? Last night, the Israeli air force bombed a mosque packed with worshipers in northern Gaza, killing 18 people and injuring dozens others. This is a an evil war crime and who ever carried out the bombing and gave the orders are war criminals that should be prosecuted and punished. Otherwise, we are in a huge jungle.
Question: How could Palestinian reporters and journalists function under the current circumstances?
Answer: They are trying their best, and they take nothing for granted. Last week, Israeli war planes bombed a Television station and two days ago the offices of the Gaza-based Arabic-daily, al Risala, was bombed and destroyed. So, they are targeting every thing…everything.
Question: will Israel succeed in eradicating the Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation?
Answer: Israel may well succeed in weakening the resistance, but it can’t destroy it. The reason for that is simple. The resistance is not a “cause” but an “effect.” The real “cause” is this Nazi-like occupation of Palestine which seeks to complete what Israel started in 1948, namely the uprooting and ethnic cleansing of the remaining Palestinians in order to replace them with Jewish immigrants from around the world. This is very much like the Nazi concept of “lebensraum.” But here in Israel they call it “security.”
In short, Israel can’t eliminate the “effect” as long as the “cause” remains intact.
Question: why have the Arab states failed to help Palestinians militarily?
Answer: Most Arab sates, probably with the exception of Lebanon, are despotic and tyrannical regimes which happen to be at America’s beck and call. These dictatorial regimes are not answerable to their own masses. More to the point, the leaders of these regimes value the legitimacy that comes from American and Israeli acceptance more than that which comes from their own people’s acceptance.
In other words, these regimes don’t represent or reflect the will of the masses. Hence, a regime-change in these states is next to impossible under the present circumstances because free and fair elections are not allowed.
Needless to say, this situation is maintained and perpetuated thanks to the unlimited support and backing by the US, the ultimate slave-master of these police states.
Question: Do Palestinians feel betrayed?
Answer: Absolutely they do. After all, we are left alone in the face of this Nazi war machine which is exterminating a people on no other account than its enduring determination to gain freedom and justice.
Question: what do you think are the main goals of the Israeli operation in Gaza?
Answer: There are many goals.
First, they are trying to break the will of the Palestinian people to resist the colonialist Israeli occupation, which is actually an act of rape. In other words, they want to continue savaging and oppressing us in ways unimaginable, and when we resist and or even complain, they threaten us with physical annihilation. It is very much like a serial rapist who threatens to murder his victims if they resists or complain. But Israel is more than just a serial rapist. It is also a murderer, liar and thief.
Another goal is simply to be able to impose a complete surrender on the American-backed Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Israel as well as the Bush Administration think, I think erroneously, that if Hamas is neutralized, the PA can be coerced into accepting a “peace” settlement whereby Israel would take all the assets and Palestinians would take all the liabilities. I am talking about a sell-out “peace deal” that would allow Israel to keep the settlements, the bulk of East Jerusalem and decapitate the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees who were uprooted from their homes when Israel was created more than sixty years ago.
Another goal is to boost the chances of Israeli war minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni wining the next Israeli elections. It is well known in Israel that the more Palestinian blood a given Israeli politician sheds, the more popular he or she will become in the eyes of the Israeli Jewish public. I am not saying that 100% of Israelis think this way. But I think the percentage is not less than 80% . In short, we are talking about a mostly cannibalistic and psychotic society that would be willing to murder millions of people while claiming to be the victim.
Question: Do Palestinians blame Hamas for the suffering and havoc and death inflicted on them as a result of the Israeli attacks?
Answer: Some may do, but I think the vast majority of Palestinians don’t. After all, it was Israel, not Hamas, that violated the ceasefire. Throughout the duration of the last cease-fire, which lasted for six months, Hamas meticulously observed the ceasefire. But Israel killed as many as 49 Palestinians. Moreover, Israel tightened the siege on Gaza, transforming the coastal territory into a modern-day Ghetto Warsaw.
Even the PA in Ramallah is saying now that Israel alone is responsible for this massive crime against humanity.
Question: why does Hamas not recognize Israel?
Answer: Why doesn’t Israel recognize Palestine? Besides, which Israel would you want Hamas to recognize? Does Israel have fixed borders? Moreover, how could we recognize a state that doesn’t recognize our very existence?
Question: I mean the 1967- borders?
Answer: Does Israel recognize the 1967 borders?
Question: Would you be willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state?
Answer: Would American Jews, for example, be willing to recognize the US as an exclusive Protestant or Baptist state?
Question: When this war is over, How will Hamas look?
Answer: Hamas will be exhausted, and this is quite natural, given the unequal and asymmetrical nature of this war. However, soon after, Hamas will reassert itself and recover her strength. But the movement has already gained the sympathy, solidarity and admiration of tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims throughout the world.
Yes, Hamas’s relations with the regimes in the Middle East may not be good, given their subservience to the US. But Hamas is watching with great satisfaction millions of Arabs and Muslims who are identifying with the movement. This is exactly what Hamas is looking for and getting. In the final analysis, the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, criminal and satanic as it is, may well be proven ultimately a bless in disguise for Hamas and the overall Islamist cause.
Similarly, the pro-American “moderate regimes” will lose whatever modicum of respect that they may have had.
