Who Cries for Palestine?
Whether it is widely known or not any country under occupation has the right to resist the occupying power. They have the right to take back the occupied land, their land, and to free the subjugated people. On this score just about everyone in the Arab-Muslim-Third world cries out for Palestine.
The honorable tradition of resistance has been followed in many places, perhaps most extensively in Europe during the Second World War. However, for the people of Palestine to do the same, to establish their own state through armed struggle, has been disparaged and their leaders labeled “terrorists.”
The legitimate right of the Palestinians to fight for their independence and to free their territory from the brutal grip of the occupier has been condemned and denied.
The Geneva Convention, crafted at the end of the war, recognizes the principle of liberation for those under occupation. Palestinians fighting the occupation of their land for much of the past forty years have not achieved much success. The country established on the land of the Palestinians by the duplicitous West has enjoyed immense support by the colonial powers in general, and the United States in particular.
These powers have provided the occupier with lethal weapons and state-of-the-art equipment to wage horrendous war like the one we just witnessed in Gaza. Three Congressmen visiting the area were horrified at the immensity of destruction. Such devastation has not been seen since the Second World War. However, while the war was going on President George Bush argued that the colonizer “has a right to defend itself.” The obverse side of that logic is of course that the Palestinians don’t have the equivalent right to defend themselves!
They are expected to accept their victimization in passive silence. They have been beaten down with violence and controls to remain under occupation.
The former colonial powers in order to perpetuate the “white man’s” rule have made it impossible for the Palestinians to fight for their independence. The horrific arsenal of the West is open for the occupier but the victimized Palestinians are prohibited from buying weapons anywhere, even at inflated prices, through the many restrictions and controls imposed on them.
That is exactly what the colonial powers did earlier when the Indonesians were fighting for their independence or the Vietnamese, the Filipinos, the Kenyans, the Algerians and so forth. All of them are free now; they attained their independence and have states of their own.
The colonial powers never want the subjugated natives to have their freedom. This is not peculiar to the occupier of Palestine. Several decades ago France claimed that Algeria was just an extension of the motherland across the Mediterranean and it just cannot break away. That is similar to the white rulers who claimed that South Africa was given to them by God to be ruled as they wished. Even Britain tried that subterfuge in Kenya but the Mau-Mau movement quickly nipped that idea in the bud.
The present colonizer’s claim that God gave them Palestine is only the latest in the long line of clever subterfuges and preposterous lies invented to claim the territories of the indigenous peoples.
At some point the “natives” ought to open their eyes and read their own history in order to understand what the West has done to them.
The “white man” has been the scourge of the world for many centuries inflicting countless barbarities on the “natives” they subjugated. Those are still very much in evidence when one considers the activities at Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo or the relentless bombings in FATA.
That is why the uprisings led by the Mahdi of Sudan, the resistance of Omar Mukhtar of Libya, of Sultan Dan Fodio of Nigeria and others, too numerous to mention, is given prominence in Islamic history.
Apparently, the armed struggle for liberation is only available to the “white man” not to the “colored natives”. These are, like the Palestinians, third class or “untermenschen,” the sub-humans.
Of course, the occupier has no intention of allowing the Palestinians to have a state of their own. Brutality is perpetrated on them routinely to make daily life impossible with the hope that they will flee. Almost every month someone proposes getting rid of them. The latest is Avigdor Lieberman, a member of Knesset, according to whom Palestinians should either be shot or simply dumped across the border in one of the neighboring countries.
Since their land was wrenched away from them, stolen in bits and pieces through the force of arms, the Palestinian resistance has been made illegal by declaring the fighters to be “terrorists.” The tradition that was seen as honorable in another context is no longer seen in the same way in the land of the “natives.” Double standard kicked in, the principle that was legitimate for the “whites” became illegitimate for the “coloreds.”
Whenever the natives stood up to the whites they were hunted down and branded “terrorists” as was done incredibly even to Mahatama Gandhi. Leaders of the colored colonized masses ranging from Ahmad Sukarno to Farhat Abbas to Jomo Kenyatta, and many others in between, were all given the despicable label of “terrorists.” The idea was to de-legitimize these leaders in the eyes their native followers and to make them into criminals.
Frantz Fannon has argued that the “native” will never be free until he stands up to the “white man”. Many others have made similar points including the French writer on colonialism, Albert Memmi. The recent event in Gaza was an illustration of the attempt by the oppressed natives to stand up to the occupier, the colonizer.
In Palestine the natives have been corralled into apartheid Bantustans very much like what the whites did to the blacks in South Africa. These resembled the ever-shrinking reservations like the ones created for the native Indians in the Americas. That is how Gaza was made into the world’s largest open-air prison.
Gaza is a small chunk of land surrounded on the four sides by the armed might of the occupier. The natives are so many sitting ducks in what resembles a shooting gallery. The fire power is delivered by the latest F-18s or the Apache helicopters supplied at the courtesy of the Pentagon with the approval of your Congressman that you voted for, and are paying their salaries, with your tax dollars paying for the weapons.
The obscene display of the fire-power that you saw, complete with the explosion of phosphorous bombs, was a demonstration of your dollars at work. Given the magnitude of the expenditures of dollars to sustain weapons of this type one wonders why the American economy is tottering on the edge of collapse.
In the technique of age-old colonizers the occupier of Palestine has gone one step beyond the white rulers of South Africa. In the West Bank the best roads (modern superhighways built on “native” land) are reserved only for the Jews, but forbidden to the Palestinians. President Carter dared to raise this issue and gave a prominent display to the odious practice of apartheid for which he was much maligned. However, we have been repeatedly told, to the point of nausea, that that colonizing-nation is the only democracy in the Middle East. Really, is that so?
