Daily Times

Recently, Israel launched air strikes against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in which scores of innocent civilian casualties including women and children have been reported. After about a week of Israeli bombing with drones and warplanes, a ceasefire has been secured with the active engagement of the UN, Egypt and the international community. As reported by the BBC, a ceasefire between Israel and the Islamic Hamas movement that runs the Gaza Strip appeared to be holding to date. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has welcomed the ceasefire and said it was urgent that humanitarian aid be delivered to Gaza.

As written in an article by Dr Razi Azmi (Daily Times, November 21, 2012), titled, “Clash of civilisations or a case of occupation?” the Israel-Palestinian conflict is “At its core — and Hamas’ ill-advised use of jihadist jargon notwithstanding — the Palestinian conflict is not about religions, civilisations and worldviews. It is about land and human dignity.”

The writer has rightly criticised the recent writing by Dr Jerry Pattengale titled, “Romney, Obama and the elephants in the room” published in The Washington Post dated November 15, 2012, which sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of the well-known explanation of Samuel P Huntington and the lesser known Vishal Magiwaldi. They see a clash of civilisations, but indeed it is a story of prolonged occupation, domination and aggression, with continued attempts to overcome occupation and achieve liberation. The article presents a typical Israeli-Jewish narrative that dominates the western media predominantly these days. It describes the Middle East that has not changed much through the centuries and where cultures clash. It refers to mutually antagonistic Arab or Israeli worldviews. Surprisingly, the writers deliberately do not use words such as occupation, land, forced eviction, refugees, Jewish settlers, separation wall, security cordons, etc. They believe and propagate that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the result of a “clash of civilisations” and “worldviews”. This piece of writing speaks volumes of the mainstream approach of western scholars and the media towards the Palestinian sufferings at the hands of continued Israeli aggression over the past several decades.

It is worth mentioning that Hamas has so far killed a total of 25 Israelis since the attacks began over 10 years ago. But Israel’s military offensive in Gaza in 2008 alone killed 1,400 Palestinians, a majority of them civilians, including many women and children. Five Israelis and more than 150 Palestinians have died since the outbreak of violence began this time.

This writing brings into the limelight the ground realities of this conflict. Gaza is just a strip of land 41 km long and six to 12 km wide. About 1.7 million Palestinians are inhabiting it, giving it a population density of 4,657 persons per square km, thus making it the world’s most densely populated and congested territory. Israeli security and border checks seldom allow an inhabitant of Gaza to go abroad. Thus, Gaza is a real-life prison for its people. Due to the Israeli blockade of Gaza’s borders, most necessities of life remain in short supply. Goods are smuggled from Egypt through a network of illegal tunnels, under surveillance of Israel’s drones and F-16s, risking interception at any moment. The frustration and humiliation for these residents of Gaza of living under such inhuman conditions must be augmented by the fact that their ancestors lived in their homes with comfort and dignity in the present Israeli cities of Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, etc. They were evicted from their homes when the new state of Israel was created by the European powers with US support, to compensate for their own collective crimes against the Jews. These powers now enable and support Israel to bully, beat and bomb the Palestinians.

It is quite puzzling and disturbing how the Israeli press and mainstream western media are now portraying the Israelis, the majority of whom are immigrants from other countries, as the victims, and the Palestinians who have been evicted from the land where they lived for generations, as the aggressors. It presents Israeli democracy against the lack of it in Arab countries, as if that justifies the Israeli occupation and the suffering of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. One needs to refresh one’s memory, as Dr Azmi points out, that the Holocaust was not the work of Muslims or atheists and the two world wars were not the result of Muslim or Arab aggression against the west. These events, blots on mankind as they are, were the handiwork of the ‘more civil’ Europeans within living memory.

As pointed out in the article, the Israeli leadership knows that another full-scale military offensive will not destroy Hamas’ power, but perpetuating the conflict will allow Israel to maintain its occupation and hegemony at US expense. Israel maintains its illegal occupation and big war-machine at little or no cost to herself. It is the US who pays with American taxpayers’ money and international goodwill, though running short of both.

This Israeli aggression against the Palestinians is a blatant violation of international law, which regulates the use of military force by states and the conduct of hostilities. Israel is wrongly using the right of self-defence as a justification for her attacks on innocent civilian targets in Gaza. Surprisingly, the US and EU member states have been supporting this unjustifiable Israeli aggression. But in fact the right of self-defence should be invoked only against another state, not against a non-state entity like Gaza. Attacks on civilians and civilian targets are banned under international law. Secondly, Gaza is still subject to Israeli occupation because of the ongoing blockade, therefore Israel cannot rely on self-defence in an occupied territory.

The issue of targeting of the civilian population by Israel is a serious one. To understand its legal implications, let us refer to the comments by Professor Guglielmo Verdirame of International Law at King’s College London, who opines that when the attacker deliberately targets civilians, there is no version of the facts capable of justifying his actions under the laws of armed conflict. The legal regulation of war is a sombre affair. This is an area of the law where starry-eyed idealism may be counterproductive. It is better to remind ourselves that during an armed conflict, the law can at best reduce suffering but never eliminate it, and that wars, even those fought with a scrupulous observance of all the rules in the book, are always a scourge. Thus, Israel should refrain from bringing further miseries and suffering to the innocent civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

It is imperative that Israel must also begin talks about opening Gaza’s border crossings and easing restrictions on the movement of people and goods, which has turned this whole territory into a real prison for the residents. It is quite an inhuman policy on the part of the extremist Israeli leadership. The Palestinian conflict is about land and human dignity. The world leaders of today like the US as well as the scholars and international community must be fair towards the plight and suffering of the Palestinians. These people have been suffering for over three generations over the past half a century at the hands of the aggressive policies of the extremist Israeli leadership, focused on greedy and cruel land grabbing and inhuman treatment for no obvious fault of these innocent victims. The international community must seize this moment to alleviate the continuing suffering of the Palestinian people. It is a debt on the world’s conscience. If they fail now, it will create a dangerous impact on the peace prospects in other war-torn areas too.

The Muslim countries in the Middle East and elsewhere should make an all-out effort to put diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel, the US and other powers that support Israeli aggression against the Palestinians. If there is any space for peaceful coexistence in today’s global system, then the Palestinians too should be given this birthright of every human being. They are simply suffering at the hands of Israeli aggression because of the fact that Israel wants to grab their land forcibly, evicting them from their ancestral homes, without any justification. The Israeli greed of land grabbing has turned so overpowering that she is not ready to give even basic human rights and liberties to the Palestinians. All these events testify to the historical evidence that Palestinians are the victims in this conflict, without any fault of theirs. By contrast, the extremist Israeli leadership remains the worst violent aggressor against the unarmed and innocent Palestinian children, women and ordinary civilian population.

The member countries of the recently held D-8 Muslim states should also play their role to end the sufferings of the Palestinian people at the hands of the aggressive Israeli leadership being perpetrated since decades.

The writer is a research scholar in Pakistan and can be reached at zulfiqar1969@hotmail.com