Israel has no "Right to Exist"
VIVA PALESTINE
by Charlotte L. Kates
Note: This article was originally posted to a private list. It was printed,
in edited form, in the Rutgers student newspaper The Daily Targum on March
5, 2003, retitled by the editors as "Palestinian roots in land proven
through history". The Targum version (here) does not include the information
about UN Resolution 194.
What may one call a state created from colonized land, stolen from its
native inhabitants and turned over to European invaders through a process of
militarily-enforced ethnic cleansing and occupation? While one may call it
"the United States," one may also call it "Israel"--but one certainly
cannot, and should not call it a "democratically-created state."
In 1947, Palestinian Arabs owned 93% of the land of Palestine. Their land
had been subject to British colonial rule since the end of World War I, at
which point those same colonizers made vague promises to the nascent Zionist
movement of a "Jewish national home" in Mandatory Palestine. The Zionist
movement was, in the early twentieth century, but one fringe of Jewish
cultural and social organization--and a reactionary one, formed in
nationalistic reaction to the internationalist organizing of Jewish
socialists, communists and anarchists; as such, despite (and perhaps because
of) European anti-Jewish hatred, the Zionist movement found support among
various European political sectors.
The Zionist movement considered not only Palestine as a place for their
dream of a "Jewish state"; it considered Argentina and Liberia as other
likely prospects--also nations of the global South, long subject to
domination, imperialism and exploitation. A largely secular movement,
nonetheless, Zionism became centered around Palestine due to its historical
and religious significance. The Zionist movement never pretended to offer
anything better to indigenous population than ethnic cleansing and
subservience; its mythology of a "land without people for a people without
land" served to consign the Palestinians to nonexistence in popular
propaganda while seeking to create such nonexistence in fact.
While Jews had always lived alongside Muslims and Christians in historic
Palestine, they were Palestinian Jews; the Zionists' essential
identification and role was not their religious affiliation but rather their
political organization as a European settler colonialist movement, seeking
the dispossession of Palestinians and the expropriation of their land.
Following World War II, a "Partition Plan" was proposed and adopted by the
United Nations; without consultation with the Palestinians who lived in
Palestine, Palestine was to be divided into two states--a "Jewish state" and
an "Arab state." Unsurprisingly, the Palestinian people resisted this new
imperialist attack; there was no compelling reason to accept the splitting
and expropriation of large amounts of Palestinian land for no other reason
than the decision of European powers and European settlers. Confronted with
the Palestinian people's desire to retain their land and independence, the
Zionist forces waged an armed onslaught. Contrary to common accounts of the
1948 war, the "Arab armies" entered not the territory granted to the "Jewish
state" in the partition plan, but only that designated as "Arab land"--the
Zionist army was equally determined to reject partition as proposed, as it
failed to satisfy dreams of a Greater Israel.
During the war of 1948, thousands of Palestinian civilians were slaughtered
and nearly a million driven from their land and homes, becoming refugees in
the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. This process of ethnic
cleansing was neither accidental nor innocuous; it had long been part of
Zionist plans for Palestine. Since that time, they have been repeatedly
denied their internationally-recognized human right to return to their homes
and homelands. Every year, the United Nations has re-affirmed Resolution
194, the resolution passed in December of 1948 that called upon all refugees
to be allowed to return to their homes. However, the newly-declared Israeli
state soon declared those refugees "absentees" and their land "absentee
property"--subject to confiscation by the state for the Jewish National
Fund, the agency that oversees over 90% of Israeli land--land that may never
be sold to a Palestinian. The Palestinian refugees have continued to demand
their human right to return; indeed, Israel's admission to the UN was
conditioned upon its acceptance of 194. Nevertheless, today, nearly five
million Palestinian refugees and direct descendants in the world are still
waiting for their right of return.
The Palestinians who remained in the land that became Israel were subject to
military rule until 1967 and continue today to be the victims of more than
twenty laws, including the Basic Laws of Israel, that deny them equal status
with Jews in Israel. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, further Palestinian
territory illegally occupied by Israel in 1967, Palestinians live under
brutal military occupation, struggling to survive and to continue to fight
back against Israeli oppression--deprived of water, facing home demolitions,
detention and torture, and death.
The oppression and occupation of Palestinian land is funded by United States
tax dollars; Israel receives more foreign aid money than any other country
in the world, and has used its extensive military aid to garner advanced
weapons to wage an illegal war in occupied territory against a civilian
population. Our money goes to pay for Apache helicopters and F-16s, raining
death and destruction on Palestinian towns; our money goes to pay for the
M-16s held by Israeli soldiers as they take aim at Palestinian
demonstrators.
All people have the right to practice their religion freely and to live in
peace, but no group of people has the right to invade the land of another,
expropriate that land by force, force out its indigenous residents, and
create a racist, brutal apartheid structure. There is no right to
imperialism, and no right to apartheid. The world said "no" in South Africa;
the world must say "no" today to Israel. As members of the Rutgers
University community, we can raise our own voices in protest; we can call
upon our university to stop financially investing in corporations that
continue to do business with the State of Israel until Israel ceases its
violations of human rights. There is no right to create an ethnically,
religiously exclusive state. As we stood against fascism and apartheid, we
must also stand against Israeli apartheid.
http://www.newjerseysolidarity.org/articles/noright.html