| http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1206-05.htm
Published on Thursday, December 6, 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 intentionally 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 brings to the living, because occupation's maintenance is deliberate, regardless of whether violent actions to maintain it purposely target the innocent for death, such deaths can only be described as intentional, and occupation and those who would preserve it bear direct responsibility for them. As such, by maintaining its occupation of Palestine, the Israeli government is directly responsible not only for the extreme misery of the lives of millions of innocent Palestinians, but for the deaths of over hundreds of innocent Palestinians in the last 14 months alone, deaths that would not have occurred but for occupation's existence. And so because the Israeli government has, through its military occupation of Palestine, 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 enterprise. 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 foolishly, reprehensively and indefensibly 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 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 the community of nations, 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. |
