Israel vs Humanity

Source: Economic and Political Weekly , Jan. 10 - 16, 2009, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jan. 10 - 16,
2009), p. 5
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly

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Israel vs Humanity
The tragedy of Palesane will end only when there is a complete democratisaüon and secularisaüon of Israel

that some people have been reduced to eating animal feed. Satellite
the night of 9-10 November 1938, the Nazis killed dozens
images show how Israel has deliberately bulldozed hundreds of
of Jews in Germany, sent thousands to concentration
Palestinian houses inside the Gaza border. The situation is so bad
camps and destroyed Jewish properties and synagogues
in an orgy of violence which removed all doubts about the
that un General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann
saidathat Israel's actions in Palestine were similar to those of apart-
nature of persecution Jews faced under the Nazi regime and was
heid South Africa. It is no wonder that leading anti-apartheid acti-
precursor of what was to come. Writing 10 days after this Nazi
vists from South Africa had, in a statement some months ago, con-
pogrom, which is known today as the Kristallnacht, Mohandas
demned Israel for following the apartheid policies of "Bantustan" in
Gandhi said, "...the German persecution of the Jews seems to have
no parallel in history." But, he went on to add, "...my sympathy occupying,
does segregating and persecuting the Palestinians.
The invocation of apartheid South Africa is important since Israel
not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national
needs
home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me", because, he to be understood for what it is. It is a state run by white Euro-
peans who have occupied Arab lands with the force of arms and
argued, "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that
are trying to disenfranchise the indigenous population and reduce
England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong
and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going onthem
in to servitude and statelessness. And, crucially, like apartheid
South Africa, Israel is a state promoted and protected by imperialism.
Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct."
Over the last seven decades since Gandhi wrote those words on
What was going on in Palestine on the eve of the second world
Jews,
war was the forcible settlement of Europeans of the Jewish faith in Arabs and Palestine, Israel has successfully occupied Palestinian
lands well beyond the "mandated" border of 1948, it has managed
lands where Arabs of Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths had lived
to brazen out global condemnation (429 un resolutions have been
for centuries, if not millennia. For Gandhi, "Surely it would be a crime
against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine passed
can against it and Israel has been condemned 321 times) and it has
out-gunned its opponents. Ably assisted by the mainstream global
be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home".
media, it has even successfully managed to portray itself as a victim
Today, we are witness to yet another brutal Israeli assault on the
defenceless and hungry Palestinians in Gaza. Unfortunately, thisof Islamic and/or Palestinian terrorism while killing thousands of
has
Palestinians, Lebanese and other Arabs. But Israel's real success
become something of an annual ritual. Last year, Israeli air strikes
can be measured by the fact that it has managed to establish a mor-
in January and February killed a few score, six months before that,
al equivalence between its actions and those of the Palestinians.
Lebanon was devastated by Israeli air strikes and artillery which
When Gandhi was writing in 1938 or even in 1946 (when the
killed more than a 1,000 civilians and displaced more than a million.
full horrors of the Holocaust were exposed), the establishment of
This list is endless and the periodic eruption of violence predictable.
the Zionist state of Israel was clearly seen as an imposition "...on
Ever since the sham withdrawal by Ariel Sharon's government
in Israel of 8,000 settlers in Gaza in 2005, Israel has turned that
Palestine with the aid of American money and British arms and
now with the aid of naked terrorism." Seven decades ago Gandhi
small, overcrowded 40 km-long coastal strip into an open air prison.
had proposed that, "The nobler course would be to insist on a
Surrounded by Israeli barbed wire and sniffer dogs, the 1.4 million
residents of Gaza have been deprived of food, medicine, fuel,
just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred".
Given that the much touted two-state formula has only lecj to
books, and every other commodity needed for daily life. A full half
the Bantustanisation of Palestine and continuing Israeli aggres-
of the population of Gaza is unemployed because of the economic
sion,
blockade that has been going on for years. Despite this, there was an perhaps the better solution to work towards would be for a
open election in 2006 in which the people of Gaza overwhelm-
single, secular, democratic state whose institutions are emptied
of their racist principles which foreground Jews and Zionism.
ingly voted for the Hamas party. Naturally, Israel and its subservient
ally, the United States (us), have refused to deal with Hamas. Remove
The the lie of an independent Palestine, which has never
been allowed to exist and will perhaps never be and demand the
economic blockade has only got tighter. In May last year, the United
secularisation and démocratisation of the state of Israel.
Nations (un) was already warning of a food crisis and reporting

Economic & political weekly 12221 January io, 2009 5

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