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WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO STOP ISRAEL?: TRUTH AND JUSTICE

Why would the Palestinians be valid negotiators since they do
not have a country? Why would they have a country, since theirs
has been taken? They have never been given any choice than to
surrender unconditionally. They have been offered only death.
In the war that opposes them to Israel, Israels actions are
considered legitimate reprisals (even if they appear
disproportionate), while those of the Palestinians are treated
exclusively as terrorist crimes. And an Arab death has neither
the same value nor the same weight as an Israeli death.
Gilles Deleuze (1978)
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Towards the end of his life the endlessly-missed Edward Said spent a term as a visiting
professor at Cambridge University. While in Britain he took part in a number of discussions
and debates, and at the end of one such event he turned to a friend and said: What is the
matter with these people, why does no one mention truth or justice any more? Said was of
course too sophisticated a thinker to be asking for a reinstallation of a full-blown positivistic
conception of truth or a conception of justice predicated on specious appeals to human rights
or universal values, appeals of the kind resorted to by George W. Bush and Tony Blair to justify
the invasion of Iraq. By truth Said was referring, primarily but not exclusively, to the
seemingly insurmountable reality represented by the ruthless dispossession of the Palestinian
people that Israel has been undertaking since its inception in 1948. By justice he was
referring to the pressing need to rectify the situation brought about by this dispossession; a
justice whose requirements seem incomprehensible to many Israelis and Americans.
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The truth of this seemingly insurmountable reality, and the overwhelming need for a
structure of justice capable of rectifying it, has been compellingly demonstrated in the most
recent Israeli onslaught on Gaza. The facts of this pitiless slaughter are by now known well-
known: the pulverizing of many areas in Gaza ensuing in a vast disproportion in the fatalities
and casualties of the two sides; the deliberate targeting of children; the attacking of schools,
hospitals, and ambulances; as well as the infliction of much suffering on the 260,000 Gazans
displaced as result of an indiscriminate bombardment that destroyed 40,000 dwellings.
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The
recent Israeli attack on Gaza is however only one of numerous episodes in the historic injustice
that has been meted-out to the Palestinian people.
The essential truth of this historic injustice resides in Israels long-term objective of
emptying the Palestinian territories of their Arab inhabitants. To this end it has used a range of
measures that involve widespread violations of international law. In addition to collective
punishments (house demolitions as well as bombardments of heavily-populated areas where
civilian casualties are inevitable), there are Israels illegal occupation and settlement of
territories seized after the 1967 War; arbitrary arrests and illegal detentions; the widespread
use of torture; expulsion and deportations; extra-judicial assassinations (targeted at the
leaders of civil society, and not just the alleged heads of the resistance militias); summary
executions of civilians; systemic employment of disproportionate force against protesters
(tanks firing on stone-throwing youngsters as a matter of routine, etc.); the already-mentioned
attacks on ambulances and medical personnel; the deliberate shooting of journalists covering
protests in the occupied territories; the use of Palestinians as human shields in military
operations; the withholding of medical aid to wounded civilians; the clearance of orchards
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and olive groves in an attempt to deprive Palestinians of their livelihoods; illegal seizures of
Palestinian property and land; the bulldozing of wells to deprive Palestinians of water; the
gratuitous destruction and looting of Palestinian civil agencies after the military occupation of
the West Bank was completed; all these are among the key elements in this long catalogue of
Israeli criminal activity. These crimes have of course largely been perpetrated in the name of
self-defense.
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The self-defense trope is impossible to warrant where Israel is concerned for
the simple reason that it is an illegal occupier according to international law, and also because,
as the UK Channel 4s correspondent in Gaza points out in the passage below, Israel has the
huge asymmetrical capacity to employ disproportionate force:
The technology of war has evolved. Living for 10 days under
constant drone surveillance in Gaza City, it occurred to me that
this might be an early foretaste of what large parts of humanity
have to suffer in the 21st century: total asymmetry of force. Israel,
for certain, carried out indefensible shelling into civilian areas;
and its soldiers are reported to have drawn arbitrary red lines,
past which they entitled themselves to shoot civilians. However,
the ability to be drone struck, or drone targeted, creates a
different issue: many of the homes struck by drones, we have to
assume, were targeted because of Hamas members who were
alleged to live inside them. But as with the USA in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, the drone strikes then killed much of the civilian families
who were in those homes. This is extra-judicial killing, by any
other name, and in the case of the non-combatants, murder.
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All this time the Palestinians have had to endure continued settlement expansion and
declining living standards, with no sign of a political settlement on the horizon. Hamas is told
repeatedly by the Israeli government and the US that its armed resistance (to which it is
entitled by international law) impedes a settlement of the dispute, even though Israels
Palestinian proxy gendarme in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, has received nothing from
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Israel in return for his subservience and cooperation apart from a few gestures of a largely
titular nature: as a reward for his compliancy President Abbas has been fobbed-off with the
trappings of a state without any entitlement or access to the real functions of a state.
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The current Israeli withdrawal of its ground forces from Gaza and the so-called truce
talks in Cairo should give us, much less the Palestinians, no grounds for hope. Israels strategy
in discussions with the Palestinians has always been the restoration of a status quo under its
more or less complete control, which in this case will involve a protraction of the illegal siege of
Gaza (there are still very dangerous terrorists hiding in those tunnels will be an obvious
briefing-point for its official propagandists such as the egregious Australian transplant Mark
Regev), and a continuation of the cruel hamstringing of Gazas economy and civil society (if we
allow them to have more freedom and power they will only use it against us will be another
briefing-point). If this is the truth/reality of the situation confronting the Palestinian people
today, what then are the conditions of a just rectification of their desperate situation?
At the very least, we-- but circumspection is counseled regarding the we to whom this
seeming imperative is addressed-- have to work for a cessation of the blithe indifference of the
West, tinged with any amount of racism and Islamophobia, when it comes to the pain and
suffering of the Palestinian people. The Western powers are locked in an embrace with Israel,
Europe less so than the US, and their electorates have in the main been acquiescent, and thus
far almost somnolently so, with regard to the pervasively asymmetrical situation between the
Palestinians and Israel.
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This systemically induced inertia on the part of the West will have to
be overcome as a solidaristic accompaniment, always subsidiary, to the struggles of the
Palestinian people. The authority of those who suffer can never be gainsaid.
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The second condition, which will have to be implemented on the disputed territory
itself, will be to find a way to make Israel accept the right of the Palestinians to self-
determination, and to acknowledge their entitlement to territory which existed when Israel had
its 1967 borders. At this juncture this clearly will necessitate a one-state solution, Israel having
obviated any possibility of a viable two-state solution by its illegal seizure and occupation of
ever-increasing tracts of Palestinian land. Concomitant with this will be the ending of the
Israeli occupation, with its arbitrary curfews and checkpoints, humiliating body searches and
haphazard violence towards Palestinians, roads in the West Bank earmarked for Jews onlyin
short, the eradication of the present Israeli-imposed apartheid system. And with this
eradication, the creation, monumentally arduous and for many unthinkable, of a single
binational state that would safeguard the civil rights and equality of all, Arabs and Jews.
Is it possible? Since the end of World War II, two absolutely unanticipated world-
historical events have occurred. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and shortly after the Soviet empire.
The overcoming of South African apartheid in so short a time was another event that could not
have been anticipated. If there is hope (and as the Jew Walter Benjamin said, hope is only
given to the hopeless), another possibility and its accompanying struggles beckon.

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NOTES
1
Gilles Deleuze, The Troublemakers, trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Discourse 20(1998), 23.
Originally published in Le Monde, April 7, 1978. The theoretical basis underpinning the notions
of truth and justice invoked here is developed in my Dealing in Straight Power Concepts:
the Quest for Justice after September 11, in Jon L. Berquist, eds., Strike Terror No More:
Theology, Ethics, and the New War (London: Chalice Press, 2002), 86-97, 340-43.
2
According to The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA):
With up to thirty percent of Gazas population displaced, an
estimated 65,000 people have no home to return to. There are
at least 187,000 displaced Palestinians in 90 UNRWA shelters.
The number of Palestinians killed stands at 1,843. 85 per cent of
Palestinian fatalities are believed to be civilians (excluding those
whose bodies could not be identified or their status is
undetermined). The Ministry of Health reports that 9,567 were
injured. During the conflict, 67 Israelis were killed, including 64
soldiers, two civilians and one foreign national.
See http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/emergency-reports/gaza-situation-report-29, accessed
on 2014-08-07.
3
The gutless Barack Obama echoed this Israeli self-defense refrain, in front of a group of
Muslim Americans and diplomats from predominantly Muslim countries, at a White House
dinner celebrating the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Obamas insensitivity on this

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occasion was almost certainly prompted by the inexplicable presence of the Israeli ambassador
at this iftar (dinner at the breaking of the Ramadan fast). On this see
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/15/obama-israel-ceasefire_n_5586229.html,
accessed on 2014-08-07.
4
See Paul Mason, Why Gaza will prove to be a game-changing event, at
http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/gaza-prove-gamechanging-event/2118, accessed
on 2014-08-08. The specialist in international law John Dugard, who was also the U.N. special
rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, has discredited Israels claim that it is
acting in legitimate self-defense in his Debunking Israels Self-Defense Argument at
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/gaza-israel-internationalpoliticsunicc.html,
accessed on 2014-08-07. The same position is taken by the human rights lawyer Noura Erakat
in her No, Israel Does Not Have the Right to Self-Defense In International Law Against Occupied
Palestinian Territory at http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/8799/no-israel-does-not-have-
the-right-to-self-defense-, accessed on 2014-08-07.
5
All Israeli governments, with the possible exception of the government led by Yitzhak Rabin
(who was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist), have done everything to preempt the
prospect of a full-blown two-state solution, typically laying the blame for this failure at the feet
of the Palestinians (it should be noted that even Rabin continued the settlement expansion
program). Netanyahu let the cat out of the bag when he said in Hebrew at a press conference
(on the fourth day of the recent Gaza attack) that he could never, ever, countenance a fully
sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank. While he is known to have previously indicated
he is opposed to a single binational Israeli state which would include Palestinians, favoring
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instead a unilateral separation from the Palestinians, he now made explicit that this could not
extend to full Palestinian sovereignty
On this see http://mondediplo.com/blogs/gaza-netanyahu-s-real-goal, accessed on 2014-08-07.
In a word: there will be no Palestinian state, Hamas or no Hamas.
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There are signs that this is changing, especially among those who are younger. See Cristina
Silva, Hamas Wins Hearts, Minds Of Millennials In Conflict With Israel, at
http://www.ibtimes.com/hamas-wins-hearts-minds-millennials-conflict-israel-1652292,
accessed on 2014-08-08.