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December 7, 2001
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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December
7, 2001
Occupation as Terrorism
By George Naggiar
Military occupation is terrorism. It targets
not merely combatants, but civilian populations. Its maintenance
is a willful act, not one that is committed by accident. It
has, in the case of Israel's prolonged occupation, a decidedly
political and wholly unjustifiable - both legally and morally
- goal of allowing forced colonization (or, as it is euphemistically
called, "settlement") on an essentially imprisoned
people. It is, in Israel's situation, a system of institutionalized
and premeditated violence that has intenationally targeted
not merely some individual Palestinians, but an entire innocent
civilian population of several million human beings.
In addition to the enormous devastation
that it has brought to the living, because Israeli occupation's
maintenance is deliberate, regardless of whether violent actions
to maintain it have purposely targeted the innocent for death,
the deaths of over hundreds of innocent Palestinians in the last
14 months alone can only be described as intentional, and occupation
and those who have worked to preserve it bear direct responsibility
for them. And so because Israel's military occupation of Palestine
has intentionally inflicted fear and, in many cases, death on
innocent Palestinian civilians for political purposes, that occupation
can, with the highest accuracy, be termed a terrorist activity.
And because it has existed for more than a third of a century
and has, over countless objections of the world community, routinely
violated basic standards of decency in human behavior as expressed
in international humanitarian and human rights law, it is terrorism
of the most hideous and uncivilized sort. Unfortunately, it
is not so described by US government officials and media.
Instead, only violent Palestinian reactions
to this system of terror are termed terrorist. Only when Palestinians
reprehensively, indefensibly and, in the end, foolishly inflict
horror on innocent Israelis has "terrorism" been said
to occur. A Molotov cocktail thrown at an occupying Israeli
soldier is an "instrument of terror". Even a Palestinian
youth throwing a stone at a heavily armed, occupying Israeli
soldier is described as committing an "act of terror".
These acts are never depicted as misguided retaliations for 34
years of the terrorism of occupation and colonization, in which
Palestinians' homes have systematically been destroyed, their
land ruthlessly colonized, their property confiscated without
due process, they have been taxed without representation, they
have been deprived of rights to their land's water and natural
resources, and they have been widely humiliated for no good reason;
rather, they are mindless "violence" unexplainable
but for "ancient hatreds" and "fanatical Islam".
And so when the Ariel Sharon-led Israeli
government violently struggles to preserve its 34-year military
occupation, it is not maintaining a system of terror, but, absurdly,
is somehow "fighting it". It is, as Mr. Bush put it,
only "defending itself". Or, even more ridiculously,
according to the US media, IT is "retaliating". This
despite the fact that retaliation implies some proportionality
in response, which has clearly been lacking in almost all Israeli
attacks (three times the number of Palestinians as Israelis have
been killed in the last 14 months), and despite the fact that
Israeli attacks are more accurately understood as the systematic
destruction of the possibility of Palestinian statehood and civil
society than they are "retaliation". Yet the fiction
persists.
The reality, however, is that for the
last 34 years, Israel's government has been engaged in a systematic
campaign of institutionalized terrorism against a captive Palestinian
civilian population. It has, in full contravention of international
law and the will of entire international community (or, if you
prefer, coalition), militarily occupied the Palestinian people's
collective space and consciousness, destroyed their homes, trees
and livelihoods, denied them all of the basic rights entitled
to human beings, and kept them from resisting this state of affairs
with enormous physical force (even employing Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat in this latter effort), all to further invade their
land with outsiders, which Mr. Sharon openly continues to insist
upon. A generation of Palestinians has literally been born into
the world as victims of this terror and they are now rebelling
in kind. And only those who cannot quiet, rather than those
who have created, their considerable (and easily comprehensible)
rage are blamed.
If this is the reality, then what is
the solution? For terrorism, all of it, must be discredited
and brought to its ultimate demise. First, rather than continue
with their counterproductive and divisive form of resistance,
the Palestinian people should finally transform their rebellion
against Israeli colonial occupation from one of violence to one
of active nonviolence. The people of Israel should and will
surely join them. And as for the United States: if US government
officials and media are serious about wanting to combat worldwide
terrorism, then perhaps before they condemn every single act
of Palestinian resistance to military occupation as "terror",
they should loudly denounce-and, in the case of our elected representatives,
cease needlessly supplying taxpayer-purchased weapons for-the
longstanding and yet still un-addressed terrorism of Israeli
occupation, a terrorism that, if not defeated, will forever prevent
peace and reconciliation for the weary and long-suffering people
of Israel and Palestine alike.
George Naggiar
is an Arab-American writer and the Chairman of the Middle East
Law and Policy Society at the Georgetown University Law Center.
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