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Now
Now that three small boys have
been killed by assassins' bullets, and a Hamas judge dragged
from his car and murdered, perhaps you are pleased. The Palestinians
are finally succumbing to your plots, you think. The long-planned
bottle has finally been sealed, in which the "drunken cockroaches"
can only crawl around, shooting each other.
Maybe you are sitting back
in your national chair, rubbing your hands together in triumph,
watching the Palestinians finally turn on each other, slowly
becoming what you always claimed they were. Maybe you are repelled,
secure in your sense of superiority.
But have you thought about
what you are you going to do, if Palestinian leadership you despise
finally disintegrates?
You have brought them to this pass, of course. You worked for
decades to achieve exactly this. You bribed, terrorized, expelled,
maimed or killed their leadership, banned or killed their visionaries
and philosophers, fanned and funded Hamas against Fatah or Fatah
against Hamas, trashed their democracy, stole their money, walled
them in, put them on a "diet", derided their claims,
and lied about their history to the world and to yourself.
But what are you going to do, Israel, if five million Palestinians
are finally living leaderless under your sovereignty? What will
you do, when they lose their capacity to negotiate with you?
Have you thought that, within the territory you control, they
are as many as you? And that now you are destroying their unified
voice? Have you thought about what will happen to you if they
truly lose that voice?
Maybe you really believe that,
if you only feed Fatah money and guns, Fatah will reclaim power
from the Hamas and restore the craven puppet Palestinian government
of your dreams. Maybe you actually believe that Fatah can revive the wreck of Oslo, step
out of the rubble of PA offices, and reclaim the driver's seat
of the Palestinian nation as before. Maybe you are telling yourself
that, with just a few more inter-factional scuffles and assassinations
and little more starvation, the entire Palestinian people will
turn on Hamas and eject it from power in favor of grinning Mr.
Abbas.
But why would you believe all this, when the only other test-case,
Iraq, is in ruins and the US and UK are desperately trying to
flee?
Do you really still live so deeply in your own fantasies that
you believe Palestinian resistance is just the product of bad
or obdurate leadership? That no collective memory of expulsion
and dispossession sustains the spirit of collective resistance
that will always and inevitably transcend that leadership? Do
you really believe that, if only you can crush or co-opt Hamas
and Fatah, five million people will simply disappear forever
from your world--trail off across the Jordanian or Egyptian borders
into the endless desert, clutching clothes, kids, and tarnished
mementos, in some great reprise of 1948?
Do you actually think that,
if the international community finally lets you off the hook
of negotiating with the people you have dispossessed and discredited,
you will somehow walk free at last, your crimes against them
forgotten?
We know you are still pursuing
the old, fatal, futile fantasy: finally to redeem the Zionist
dream by demolishing Palestinian nationalism. To break Palestinian
national unity on the rocks of occupation. To reduce the Palestinians
to Indians on reservations who decline into despair, alcoholism
and emigration. To make them irrelevant to you.
But here is news for you, Israel.
The Native Americans haven't given up to this day. Damaged and
reduced as they are, they know their history and remember their
grievances. They are marginal only because they are one percent
of the US population. The Palestinians are five-million strong,
equal to you in numbers. And they live within your borders. When
their leadership ruins itself, bashing each other like rams fighting
to the death, they will finally turn their five million pairs
of burning eyes on you, for you will be the only power left over
them. And you will be defenseless, because your paper shelter
- your Fatah or PA quislings - will be damaged goods, cracked
vessels, discredited, gone. And it will then be you and those
you have disenfranchised - you and the Palestinians, in one state,
with no Oslo or Road Map myth to protect you. And by then, they
will truly hate you.
Then perhaps it will dawn on
you what you have done, when the disintegration of Palestinian
national unity spreads out like a tsunami through the Middle
East, meeting up with the tsunami spreading out from Iraq, to
lay the region waste and rebound on you.
Watching you create this catastrophe
for yourself, we think you are simply suicidal. We could just
watch, but your road to ruin promises too much suffering to too
many people. Still, to avert your unilateral suicide pact with
the Palestinians, to whom can we turn?
We could appeal to Hamas at last to mobilize the rank and file,
who alone have the capacity to launch civil disobedience on the
mass scale necessary to paralyse Israel's iron fist, but Hamas
has no experience with this method, and now its statesmen are
cornered by the guns you gave to Fatah thugs.
We could appeal to the leader
of the Fatah thugs, Mr. Abbas, shuffling at the feet of Israeli
power, to find some spine. Or to the ubiquitous Mr. Erekat, who
never had a political vision in his life, to develop one overnight.
We could appeal to the Fatah
thugs to reject Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erekat and the fat cement contracts
you gave them to build the Wall that imprisons them, and seek
a high road they have never glimpsed.
We could appeal to the microscopic
PFLP and DFLP, clutching their old programs too stale to chew
and consumed by their acrid, decades-old bitterness and rivalry
with Fatah, to lift their heads at long last beyond the old and
new grievances.
We could appeal to the US,
but no one bothers to do that.
We could appeal to the EU,
but no one bothers to do that, either.
We could appeal to the world,
but it only stands aghast.
We could appeal to the world
media, but it is frozen with its ass in the air.
We can only appeal to you,
Israel. To think what you are doing, if not to care.
For you are crafting your own
destruction.
You have been so effective
in this great national project because you work from experience.
Even the most courageous, principled, and sensible people, as
you learned, cannot withstand a concentration camp indefinitely.
At some point, as the Holocaust historians have tracked with
such pathos, humanity breaks down. Individual heroism may survive
as memoirs, but order, humanity, and finally human feeling decays
into factional squabbles and man's inhumanity to man. You learned
all too well and bitterly how this cauldron can melt down the
very fabric of a society and shatter people. The lesson is burned,
literally, into your national memory. And you are bringing those
lessons to bear, attempting to purge Zionism's tragedy by bringing
Gaza to ruin.
But if you actually reap the
chaos you are crafting for the Palestinians, you will find that
no one else is responsible for these five million civilians except
you.
So what will you do, Israel,
with five million people living under your rule, when you can
no longer pretend to the world that you intend to negotiate with
them? What will you do with people you detest, and who finally
utterly detest you, when visions of coexistence have finally
failed? You will be the only sovereign power over them. You will
be able neither to digest them nor to vomit them out. And they
will stare at you.
And we will stare at you, too.
Because there will be no one left to blame, and no one to take
care of them, except you.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
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