Gaza: First Test for Barack H.Obama

posted by din merican—January 9, 2009

By Farish A. Noor

Senior Fellow, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

That the discourse of the ‘War on Terror’ is a terribly useful one for governments that wish to exteriorise, dehumanise and brutalise an enemy is a foregone conclusion for many of us by now. Since the day when the term was first coined by the administration of President George W. Bush, it has made its rounds all over the planet and has been seized upon with gusto and delight by many an authoritarian regime seeking a pretext to detain and eliminate their enemies. Till today we do not have a tally of the figures of those who have been summarily arrested, detained without trial, tortured and ‘disappeared’ as a result of this War on Terror which, as any linguist will tell you, doesn’t even signify anything meaningful in the first place.

The current onslaught on Gaza is proof of the utility of such a discourse when it falls into the hands of those currying favour with the Washington administration – and here it doesn’t really matter if the man sitting in the oval office is Bush Junior or Mr. Obama. Israel’s relentless attacks on the Palestinians has been couched and justified as part of the global war effort against terrorism, and as a result the Palestinians have in toto been summarily labelled as terrorists who, by extension, deserve neither mercy nor understanding.

Even more worrying still is the manner in which the metanarrative of the war on terror has been appropriated by other countries and governments that are likewise in a bellicose mood and warlike demeanour. The mainstream media in India, for instance, have likewise hopped on to the anti-terror bandwagon and have taken to it like a duck to water. In the wake of the Mumbai attacks – which were indeed an instance of terrorism at work – the right-wing parties and political demagogues of India’s hard-right have upped the ante even further calling on the Indian government and armed forces to ‘do a Gaza’ on Pakistan next door.

Calling on the Indian armed forces to ‘do a Gaza’ on Pakistan is what the world needs the least at the moment, what with the global recession spiralling out of control and the economic fortunes of many a developing countries laid low. Worse still would be the political fall-out for both India and Pakistan, two countries that enjoy the dubious distinction of having nuclear parity and the potential of wiping each other out for good. The hawks of India find their kindred spirits next door, among the hawks of Pakistan who likewise feel that the peace and dialogue process has gotten both countries nowhere, and that a final settlement has to be reached through force of arms.

But in both cases, we see once again how the discourse of the ‘War on Terror’ has been used to demonise and dehumanise the other across the border. And sadder still is the fact that today all acts of terrorism are immediately and casually equated with the Arabs, and with Palestinians in particular.

So has Gaza become the leitmotif and metaphor for the year 2009? If the ‘War on Terror’ is based on a zero-sum logic of eliminating one’s enemies without mercy, then ‘doing a Gaza’ on one’s opponents seems to be the standard operational tactic to be employed at the moment. Having dehumanised the Palestinians and robbed them of their identity, history and the very same historical basis of their existence and justification for their acts, the world community now sits passively by as Israel ‘does a Gaza’ on the people of Palestine who have been rendered inhuman and reduced to statistics.

It is therefore painfully and pitifully ironic to see how the victims of Israeli aggression and expansionism have been doubly dealt a low blow thanks to the adept utilisation of the ‘War on Terror’ discourse on the part of the Zionists. Israel’s constant demand to have groups like Hamas and Hizbullah labelled terrorist organisations is simply part of a bigger process of discrediting the Palestinian struggle and the demands of the Palestinian people as a whole; rendering them a people without a past, a land, an identity and bereft of justifiable demands and aims.

Yet have we grown so cynical and jaded today that we do not see a repeat of history taking place before our very eyes? In the bad old days when we grew up watching John Wayne movies we were taught that the nasty native Americans were the ‘bad injuns’ whose only purpose in life was to slaughter and scalp poor innocent white people. In time however we grew up and came to learn that the native Americans were in the fact the real victims of a massive genocide which led to the extinction of five hundred tribal nations and the creation of the United States of America on what is basically a massive graveyard of native Americans.

Today we are witnessing the aggressive onslaught on the Palestinians that is likewise justified and rationalised on the basis of a war on terror and terrorists; and where the Palestinian people – who have been robbed of their land, rights and self-respect – have been discursively reconfigured as irrational, fanatical terrorists instead. A return to the genocidal politics of John Wayne via the route of the ‘War on Terror’? It doesn’t take much intelligence to see how the discourse of the war on terror has terrorised others on both the physical and epistemic level.

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Israeli Violence Makes Peace a Practical Impossibility

This question makes three inaccurate presumptions. First, it presumes that Hamas’ ideology remains the primary obstacle to a two-state solution (an independent Palestinian state and a secure Israeli state), whereas the complete opposite is true. Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank in defiance of international law (i.e. UN Resolution 194 passed in 1948, Res. 242 passed in 1967, and Res. 338 passed in 1973, to name a few) and its continuous bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip have been the greatest obstacle to a two-state solution and a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel has made the creation of an independent Palestinian state not only a “theoretical impossibility,” but a practical impossibility.

Despite the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the dismantling of illegal Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel continued to occupy the Gaza Strip by maintaining complete control of the territory by sea, air and land. Further, it has used this territorial control to impose an inhumane economic siege upon the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza for the last 18 months. By preventing the entry of food, fuel, medicine and even humanitarian aid, the blockade has resulted in the utter collapse of the economy in Gaza, forcing its sole power plant to shut down. Consequently, hospitals have been unable to operate lifesaving equipment and nearly 40-50 tons of sewage pours into the sea daily.

Worse yet, since December 27, Israel has launched one of the most atrocious onslaughts against a civilian population since the turn of this century in the Gaza Strip. After closing off all of the Gaza Strip’s borders, thus, ensuring that its civilians had no escape from the teeming, bloody hell known as Gaza, it began a massive aerial bombardment of the strip, followed by a ferocious ground invasion. In the first 48 hours of this war, Israel killed over 350 civilians. The death toll has currently exceeded 700 with over a third of the dead being children.

The images I’ve seen on Arab satellite over the last two weeks of maimed Palestinian children, corpses crushed under pulverized homes, and the reckless destruction of homes, schools, UN refugee camps, mosques and police stations, leave no question in my mind that Israel’s assault against the Gaza Strip is the epitome of state terror and a war crime against humanity. The world’s silence and inability to force a ceasefire in the face of such atrocities speaks volumes about the type of leadership we currently have. We have a leadership that values strategic interests over human lives, a leadership that justifies the killing of over 700 Palestinians as “self-defense,” and one that hypocritically denounces terrorism, yet is indifferent to the killing of Palestinian civilians.

While Israel claims it is targeting Hamas militants, the facts speak for themselves. According to a Norwegian physician in one of Gaza’s hospitals, Mads Gilbert, over 801 children had been injured or killed by January 6. As he told the BBC, “The numbers are contradictory to everything Israel says. This is the worst man-made disaster for the time I can think (of).”

Second, this question is yet one more attempt to depict Israel as standing on the brink of survival, which is grotesquely inaccurate. This mischaracterization of Israel as struggling to “survive” against a hostile, uncompromising Hamas is so far-fetched that it makes a mockery of the facts on the ground. Israel is one of the most powerful, self-sufficient and technologically advanced countries in the world that its survival is no longer in question. It has the fourth most powerful military in the world, a growing econtomy with a Gross Domestic Product (purchasing power parity) of$85.8 billion in 2007, and the unconditional support of the United States in the form of military and economic aid and UN veto power. As noted by political scientists Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, “Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll.”

Compare this with the unbearable economic conditions of the Gaza Strip, where over eighty percent of the population subsists on $2 a day. Consider that in June 2005, there were 3,900 factories in Gaza employing 35,000 people and today there are less than 195 left employing only 1,750 people. Further, the agriculture sector has come to a standstill and nearly 40,000 workers who depend on cash crops no longer have an income. While these conditions have been aggravated by the three-year economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, the truth is that Israel has deliberately impeded the growth of the Gazan economy since 1967.

As Avi Shlaimwrites in The Guardian, “To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.”

Third, this question falsely presumes that Hamas’ ideology makes Israel’s existence a theoretical impossibility. This excuse has been used time and time again by Israel and the Western media to justify Israel’s military attacks against the Gaza Strip. As early as May 2006, three months after Hamas was elected to office in the first democratically-held Palestinian elections, Hamas leaders officially declared that they would accept a “two-state” solution in which Palestinians have “freedom and independence side by side with our neighbors.” By recognizing the state of Israel, Hamas had relinquished the Palestinians’ historic claim over 78% of what was previously considered Palestine. For the first time, Hamas leaders declared on several occasions their willingness to recognize the state of Israel if Palestinians enjoyed their independent state.

This was a historic opportunity for peace which Israel did not care to explore. Instead, it chose to unleash the madness we are witnessing on the civilian population of Gaza. Certainly, this option will not make Israel any more secure or the conflict any closer to reaching a peaceful resolution. In fact, by destroying Gaza’s infrastructure, wounding over 3000 Palestinians and killing over 700 civilians, it will only fuel extremism and hatred among a population that lives under the threat of Israeli violence and in abject poverty.

Posted by Hadia Mubarak on January 9, 2009

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