This is the text of a talk I delivered at a forum entitled “Cutting through the lies on Palestine” on Friday July 11.
On June 12, three Israeli teens were kidnapped and killed. If you listen to or read the U.S. corporate media and trust it, then you might believe this was an act of Palestinian terrorist organizations that began the current battle between Israelis and Palestinians in which they are “exchanging” firepower. You might even believe that the resulting “exchange of firepower” is being carried out between two equal entities.
The media’s presentation of the situation is a distortion of the truth. The blatant distortion was most recently blasted across the media when Dianne Sawyer showed two pictures of Palestinian families and named them as victimized Israelis. This is not a moment of mistake—although it’s far more blatant than the media normally is. But Palestinian deaths are hardly ever reported by US media and they happen daily. Israelis deaths—far more rare—are held up as striking blows to humanity.
What did happen?
On June 12, three Israeli students were hitchhiking from an illegal settlement in the West Bank when they were kidnapped and killed. Settlements are not just illegal occupation but are essentially military outposts of Israel. Most settlers are heavily armed, quite fascistic in their outlooks and routinely exercise violence against Palestinians. It’s not like they were just teenagers going for a stroll around the neighborhood. Settlers know, and they act like, all Palestinians are their enemies.
Israeli police, the intelligence officials of Shin Bet and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself knew of the incident within hours. They had two suspects within a very short period of time.
Did they post the information in hopes of finding the murderers? Did they give the Israeli teens families any information?
No. Quite the opposite. Israel is a colonial apartheid state and its government acted in the interest of that state—not the interests of any the people living in the region. Seeing this as an opportune moment to destroy the unity agreement negotiated between Fatah and Hamas in April, Israel initiated a military and a propaganda assault.
The Israeli government suppressed the information—issuing a gag order to all Israeli news outlets that said all Israeli reporters were forbidden from publishing “All the details of the investigation” and “All details that might identify the suspect.” That gag order was published by MondoWeiss on June 23.
They lied to the Israeli teens’ parents—telling them that the shots they heard on a recording of the kidnapping were “blanks.” Days later when the car used in the kidnapping was found, the parents were told that no DNA evidence had been found. This was an outright lie.
All-out raids on the Palestinian people destroyed universities and homes. They kidnapped 560 Palestinians—including 200 who are still held without charges. While going house to house ostensibly looking for Hamas supporters and blaming Hamas for the kidnapping, Shin Bet secretly interrogated the families of the two suspects. When the bodies of the three teens were found by a volunteer group (not Shin Bet, who wasn’t really looking for them), the Israeli army detonated a explosive charges in the homes of the two suspects and announced they were reinstating a policy of home demolitions of families of those accused of terrorism. Collective punishment of a population is expressly forbidden by international law and is an act of terrorism.
The government launched a social media frenzy using #bringbackourboys. They flew Rachel Frenkel, the mother of one of the teenagers, Naftali Frenkel, to Geneva to ask for help bringing her son home. The Israeli state created and encouraged a climate of genocidal violence to support their military assault on the Palestinian territories.
The delay and the propaganda war whipped up anti-Arab racist hatred and violence among the Israeli population—creating an even more dangerous situation for Palestinians living within Israel’s borders as well and justifying the military assault on Gaza. On July 2, a 16-year old Palestinian boy was murdered—burned alive—by captors who were identified in video footage and who kidnapped the boy right next to Israeli police. Another gag order suppressed this information. Israeli police also viciously beat a 15-year old Palestinian American who was then held for days without being able to see his parents.
In the midst of this, on June 17, Israeli ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor spoke in New York City. He said “It has been five days since our boys went missing and I ask the international community, where are you? Where are you?” In reference to the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement and the new government it produced, he said “All those in the international community who rushed to bless this marriage should look into the eyes of the heartbroken parent and have the courage to take responsibility by condemning the kidnapping. The international community bought into a bad deal and Israel is paying for it.” What a colonial statement! In other words, the Palestinian people, a sovereign people have no right to unify themselves, and that very unity is a danger to Israel—causing the kidnapping of the three teens. Prosor’s statement clearly identifies the unity agreement as the target of the propaganda and military campaign.
What was the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement and why is Israel so upset about it?
Fatah is the largest faction and leading political party in the Palestine Liberation Organization. One of its founders was Yassir Arafat. Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, is a Muslim resistance organization that became prominent for its rejection of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Those accords provided for limited autonomy for the Palestinian people while the PLO agreed to recognize the state of Israel for the first time.
The need for the recent unity agreement began in 2006 following legislative elections in which Hamas won a majority. The victory shocked Israel and its imperialist supporters.
And what do I mean by Israel’s imperialist supporters? Israel owes its very existence to the desire of British imperialism to have an outpost in the beginning of the 1900’s with which to challenge other imperialist powers as the lay claim to the failing Ottoman empire. They recognized the region as a source of resources and as strategically important. The Zionist project offered themselves as that outpost. As the United States became the dominant imperialist power during and after World War II, it took over as Israel’s colonial supporter.
Israel and the United States have a very close relationship. Israel depends on the U.S. for huge amounts of military and material aid. The United States views Israel as a bastion of support for imperialism in a sea of resistance—a watchdog. That watchdog however doesn’t always do exactly as U.S. imperialism would wish and the relationship can be complicated. In the current expanding war, we can see the evidence of this relationship as Obama gives a green light to the military assault but warns mildly against the dangers of an all-out ground invasion. Support for Israel in the United States ruling class is bipartisan and a prerequisite for high office because of the U.S. need for an imperialist watchdog in the region.
The U.S. government under President Bush at the time of the 2006 elections had actually pushed for the elections calculating that Fatah would win legitimacy through an electoral victory. Fatah had become more and more amenable to concessions to U.S. demands. The Bush administration thought it would be able to make an agreement between Fatah and Israel and undermine the Palestinian resistance to occupation.
After the Hamas electoral victory, the U.S., Israeli and the European Union governments—all of whom pose as great champions of “democracy”—imposed harsh economic sanctions, seizing Palestinian tax revenues and cutting off aid to an already impoverished population. Gaza was sealed off from the rest of the world.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas of the world with 1.5 million people living in a 25-mile strip. The blockade came on top of years of deliberate Israeli attempts to destroy the economy of both the West Bank and Gaza, which had already sharply reduced living standards and made Palestinians, especially in Gaza, dependent on outside assistance.
The blockade intended to make the Palestinian population turn against the Hamas-led government. When that failed, the U.S. leaders implemented a classic divide-and-conquer colonial tactic, hoping to instigate armed conflict among Palestinian forces, particularly Hamas and Fatah.
Until April of this year, there has been a split. Hamas has governed Gaza and Fatah the West Bank. In April, the two groups announced an agreement and have moved forward, in May announcing new Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah.
Israel’s constant attempts to foment division and undermine Palestinian resistance were pushed back by the unity agreement. This is the unity agreement that was the target for Israel’s assault after the three teens
were kidnapped—which the Israeli state viewed not as a tragedy but as an opportunity.
There is no sign of a deteriorating agreement between Hamas and Fatah. The resistance of the Palestinian people has stood strong—using what little weaponry is available to them. As the infograph shows the media’s depiction of two nearly equal sides exchanging firepower is a complete lie. The longest range missile available to the Palestinians in Gaza has a range of 47 miles. The Israeli military has F-16s, drones and missile with a range 4000 miles.
And Israel has unleashed a horrific assault on the Palestinian people. In two days—from Tuesday to Thursday, 77 Palestinians had been killed. Israel has called up 20,000 reservists in preparation for a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza.
The numbers reported in the U.S. media itself show the lies for what they are. From Tuesday to Thursday 442 “projectiles” have been fired on Israel and “have caused NO (NO!) fatalities or serious injuries.” The Palestinian people have no protection from the massive bombs being dropped on them yet the U.S. has partially funded Israel’s Iron Dome aerial defense system to intercept these “projectiles.”
This is not war between two equally armed sides. This is the might and fury of a military—paid for by millions of U.S. tax dollars—being unloaded on an indigenous population—on the Palestinian people. This is an act of occupation and of genocide.
Underlying the current assault and the potential for an even wider war on Gaza and the Palestinian people is the colonial reality of the entire occupation: Israel is a project of imperialism, a state created for one sector of the population at the expense of the indigenous population.
The state itself is founded on incalculable acts of terrorism. More than 80 percent of the Palestinian population was driven out of its homeland to make “space” for the Israeli state. On Nov 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 to separate the British colony of Palestine into two states. The Jewish state—exclusively retained for one sector of the population, the Jews—was awarded 56 percent of Palestine. They made up less than a third of the population and owned just 6 percent of the land. The passing of Resolution 181 represented the beginning of Al-Nakba, the catastrophe.
In January of 1948 the Zionist military forces initiated Plan Dalet to terrorize and drive out, essentially exterminate the Palestinian people. In April, a Zionist terrorist organization, the Irgun raised the level of Plan Dalet to all-out brutality. They massacred an entire village—killing more than 200 Palestinian children, women and men.
Twelve days after Deir Yassin, Zionist forces launched a lethal attack on the Palestinian areas of the mixed city of Haifa. They rolled barrel bombs filled with gasoline and dynamite down narrow alleys in the heavily populated city while mortar shells pounded the Arab neighborhoods from overhead. Nearly the entire Arab population fled.
By May 15, 1948, when Israel’s independence was proclaimed, 300,000 Palestinians were living in abominable conditions of exile in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and the Jordan Valley. By the end of that year, the number of dispossessed Palestinians had grown to 750,000. In the 1948 war, Israel, with its superior economic and military resources and support from the Western powers, conquered 78 percent of Palestine.
The history of the occupation of Palestine reaches back to before 1948 (but not to a centuries old religious conflict as is often claimed) and much more has developed since then. The way in which Israel was established clearly shows its colonial, apartheid character—one that has not significantly shifted to this day. The fact remains that Israel is a state reserved for one people. Any Jewish person can claim citizenship and live there. The indigenous population that has suffered one threat of genocide after another continues to live as refugees around the world with no right to return to their homeland. And that colonial state, founded on acts of terrorism, on racist apartheid, is held up in the United States as a bastion of freedom and democracy. It is given billions of dollars in aid. And it is an essential task of people here in the United States to stand with the people of Palestine in the interests of peace and in the interests of social justice for an end to apartheid, for an end to the attacks on the Palestinian people.
