Hillary,
This morning I have read an excellent opinion piece titled "The Gaza
Ghetto Uprising" by Joseph Massad that pins down some of your
questions regarding the reasons why Arab regimes are accomplice to the
colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians by
Israel.
Thomas, shame on you!
Best,
Omar
...
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10110.shtml
The Gaza Ghetto Uprising
Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 4 January 2009
Nazi troops round up Polish Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in
May 1943. (Photographer Unknown)
One is often baffled by the ironies of international relations and the
alliances they foster. Take for example the Israeli colonial
settlement that had declared war on the Palestinian people and several
Arab countries since its inception while at the same time it built
alliances with many Arab regimes and with Palestinian leaders.
While Hashemite-Zionist relations and Maronite Church-Zionist
relations have always been known and documented, there has been less
documentation of the services that Israel has provided and continues
to provide to Arab regimes over the decades. It is now recognized that
Israel's 1967 invasion of Egypt aimed successfully to destroy Gamal
Abdul-Nasser, the enemy of all US dictatorial allies among the Arab
regimes, whom the US and before it Britain and France had tried to
topple since the 1950s but failed. Israel thus rendered a great
service to Arab monarchies (and a few republics) from "the ocean to
the Gulf," whose survival was threatened by Nasser and Nasserism.
Israel's subsequent intervention in Jordan in 1970 to help the
Jordanian army destroy Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
guerrillas and its final crushing of that organization in its massive
invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 were also important services it
rendered to these same regimes threatened by the PLO's "revolutionary"
potential and its sometimes recalcitrant positions. Israeli
intelligence has also provided over the decades crucial information to
several Arab regimes enabling them to crush their political opposition
and strengthen their dictatorial rule. Prominent examples among
recipients of Israeli intelligence largesse include the Moroccan and
the Omani dictatorships.
Israel's services to Arab regimes continue apace. Its 2006 invasion of
Lebanon, engineered to destroy Hizballah, was cheered by Arab regimes
and neoliberal Arab intellectuals hostile to Hizballah and employed
exclusively by Saudi media outlets. Though the massive Israeli
destruction of southern Lebanon and south Beirut and the massacres of
more than a thousand Lebanese strengthened Hizballah and weakened
Israel's military standing, the invasion was much appreciated by
Israel's Arab allies. Indeed since 2006, Israel's Arab regime allies
as well as neoliberal Arab intellectuals have been openly calling on
it to neutralize the so-called Iranian "threat" for its own sake and
at their behest as well. The US has seen this as an opportune moment
to fully integrate Israel in the region, so much so that it signaled
to its Gulf allies to make proposals for a new regional alliance that
includes Israel in its midst. The Bahraini foreign minister suggested
a few weeks ago that Israel join the Arab League. Many such proposals
have already been made in the past few months welcoming the colonial
settlement to the regional alliance against Iran.
Since 2006, Arab regimes, neoliberal Arab intellectuals, as well as
the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority (PCA) in Ramallah have
reached an understanding that only Israel will be able to save them
from Hizballah and Hamas, both organizations constituting a threat to
the open alliance Arab regimes have with the US and Israel against
Iran and all progressive forces in the region. These were not closely
guarded secret hopes, but strategies that were openly discussed in
private meetings, which often spilled into the public realm. The
discussions in the Arab media and the declarations made by Israeli
officials in the context of the ongoing Israeli massacres of the one
and a half million Palestinians in Gaza in the last 10 days have left
little to the imagination. A veritable open alliance now exists
between the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority, Arab regimes, and
Israel with the support of neoliberal Arab intellectuals, wherein
Israel is subcontracted to decimate the Hamas government -- the only
democratically elected government in the entire Arab world.
Here let us remember that Hamas was democratically elected in free
elections and that its elected officials and members of parliament
were kidnapped by the Israeli occupation and have been languishing in
Israeli jails for years, and that the Palestinian Collaborationist
Authority set their offices on fire, staged strikes against them, and
signaled the PCA bureaucracy not to follow their orders. It was after
all this failed to dislodge Hamas from power that the US, Israel, and
the PCA staged a coup to massacre Hamas leaders in Gaza that backfired
on them. The carnage unleashed by Israel in the last 10 days is the
latest attempt by Israel to ensure that all Arabs and all Palestinians
are ruled by dictators and never by democratically elected officials.
Many are wondering how the Arab regimes and the PCA can be so brazen
in their "treachery" of the Palestinians. "Don't they fear being
overthrown by the people?" is an oft-repeated question. The answer of
course is a resounding "no." It is true that collaboration with Israel
by Arab regimes is not new, and that what is new is merely their
openness about it, but there is a perfectly good reason for this. In
the 1940s and the 1950s, these regimes could not declare openly their
alliance with Israel, as there were popular and international forces
that would have removed them from power had they done so. Indeed, some
at the time flirted with alliances that unofficially included Israel,
like the Baghdad Pact, but they paid a heavy price for such
collaboration. The Cold War, Third World revolutionism, Arab
nationalism, the Soviet Union, China, Nasser, were all factors to be
considered. While a few of these factors had remained when Egypt's
Sadat declared his open alliance with the US and Israel in the late
1970s, none of these factors remains today. The US, Israel, and their
major Arab allies have neutralized these forces one by one since 1967,
opening the way for this brazen alliance between Israel and the Arab
dictatorships, all of which are in the service of US interests in the
region. These Arab regimes rule by terror and fear and have at their
disposal the best secret police and repressive security apparatus that
the US can train and equip and which oil money and US aid can buy.
When Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was asked point blank by
al-Jazeera's anchorman if Israel had an arrangement with Arab regimes
to commit the Gaza massacres, she refused to answer and finally denied
such an arrangement existed but could not help but affirm that there
are those in the Arab world who "think" as Israel does and that Hamas
is their enemy as it is the enemy of Israel. This is, incidentally,
the same Tzipi Livni, who only a few weeks ago informed Palestinian
citizens of Israel that she has slated them for denationalization and
deportation to the Palestinian Bantustans once Israel and the
international community grants these West Bank prisons the status of
an independent Palestinian state enclosed within the apartheid wall.
After her war on Palestinians in Gaza started last week, Livni
declared that her war against the Palestinian people is not only about
security but also about Israel's "values" which non-collaborator
Palestinians (unlike the PCA) do not share. Livni is of course right.
Unlike Livni and the Israeli leadership, whose ethnic-cleansing ideals
and plans are to make Israel a purely Jewish state that is
Palästinenser-rein, most Palestinians believe that they should remain
present on their lands even and especially if this sullies the purity
of a Jewish Israel.
Livni has also asserted that Israel's values are shared by the "free
world" and by unfree Arab regimes that are allies of the "free world."
We can add, that her values are also shared by Saudi-funded neoliberal
Arab intellectuals and by the leadership of the Palestinian
Collaborationist Authority ensconced in the Green Zone of Ramallah.
The civilized values of Israel are not unlike those espoused by the US
in its ongoing wars against Arabs and Muslims, and are very much like
European colonial values during the high age of colonialism and
beyond. Livni and the Israeli leadership speak of human rights,
democracy, peace, and justice as universal while applying them only to
Jews and denying them especially to Palestinians. This is hardly an
Israeli ruse. Let us remember the undying words of Frantz Fanon in
this regard: "leave this Europe where they never tire of talking of
man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every
one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe."
On the Palestinian front, the term of chief Palestinian collaborator
and coup leader Mahmoud Abbas ends on 9 January. Israel hopes to
extend his collaborationist rule as head of the PCA it set up through
the Oslo agreement in 1993. As Palestinians are murdered and injured
in the thousands, world powers are cheering on. This is hardly a new
development. It happens often in the context of other populations
being murdered by allies of the US and Europe, and it even happened
during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding. On 19 April
1943, Britain and the US met in Bermuda, presumably to discuss the
situation of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. That was also the day when
the Nazis had launched their war against the remaining Jews in the
Warsaw Ghetto but were met with unexpected courageous resistance.
Little came out of the Bermuda Conference and the ongoing war against
the Warsaw Ghetto proceeded uninterrupted. The Jewish resistance in
the Warsaw Ghetto executed Jewish collaborators with the Nazis and
bravely faced up to the Nazi army with what little weapons it had
before being massacred. Their uprising was always inspirational to the
Palestinians. In the heyday of the PLO as a symbol of Palestinian
liberation, the organization would lay flower wreathes at the Warsaw
Ghetto monument to honor these fallen Jewish heroes.
Szmul Zygielbojm was the leader of the Jewish socialist party, the
Bund, in Poland and was part of the resistance against the Nazi
invasion in 1939. He would later become a hostage held by the Nazis
but would later be released and made a member of the Jewish council or
judenrat, the Nazi equivalent of the Israeli-created Palestinian
Collaborationist Authority, and which was charged with building a
Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Zygielbojm opposed the Nazi order and fled to
Belgium, France, the US, and in 1942 ended up in London where he
joined the Polish government in exile. On 12 May 1943, after he
received word that the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto was finally
crushed and many of its fighters killed, Zygielbojm turned on the gas
in his London flat and committed suicide in protest against the
indifference and inaction of the Allies to the plight of the Jews in
Nazi-occupied Europe. He also felt that he had no right to live after
his comrades were killed resisting the Nazis. In his suicide letter,
Zygielbojm insisted that while the Nazis were responsible for the
murder of the Polish Jews, the Allies, through their inaction, were
also guilty:
The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear
beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants
of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the
ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.
The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish
nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it
out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the
peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this
day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on
passively upon this murder of defenseless millions, tortured children,
women and men they have become partners to the responsibility ...
I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of
Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My
comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the
last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together
with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave.
By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest
against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the
destruction of the Jewish people ...
The Palestinian Collaborationist Authority that runs the judenrat set
up by Oslo has never even attempted to resist Israeli orders. Not one
member of the top leadership decided to resign and not serve. Mahmoud
Abbas, having provided so many dishonorable services to Israel, lacks
Zygielbojm's integrity and noble principles and would never follow in
Zygielbojm's footsteps.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian people will resist the invading Israelis
with all their might and against astronomical odds. The Palestinian
people, like Zygielbojm before them, understand very well that Abbas,
his clique, the Arab regimes, the US and Europe are all culpable in
their slaughter as much as Israel is. In the case of Zygielbojm, he
blamed world powers for their indifference and inaction, in the
Palestinian case, world and regional powers are co-conspirators and
active partners in crime.
The crushing of the Gaza Ghetto Uprising and the slaughter of its
defenseless population will be relatively an easy task for the giant
Israeli military machine and Israel's sadistic political leadership.
It is dealing with the aftermath of a strengthened Palestinian
determination to continue to resist Israel that will prove much more
difficult for Israel and its Arab allies to deal with. While the
thousands of dead and injured Palestinians are the main victims of
this latest Israeli terrorist war, the major political loser in all
this will be Abbas and his clique of collaborators. The test for
Palestinian resistance now is to continue to refuse to grant Israel
the right to conquer populations, to steal their land, to destroy
their livelihoods, to imprison them in ghettos, and to starve them
without being resisted.
The only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century of Zionist
atrocities has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing them
from the face of the earth. While Zionism sought and recruited Arab
and Palestinian collaborators since its inception in the hope of
crushing Palestinian resistance, neither Israel nor any of its
collaborators has been able to stop it. The lesson that Zionism has
refused to learn, and still refuses to learn, is that the Palestinian
yearning for freedom from the Zionist yoke cannot be extinguished no
matter how barbaric Israel's crimes become. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising
will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to
colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region
whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European
colonial settlement in their midst.
Joseph Massad is associate professor of modern Arab politics and
intellectual history at Columbia University in New York.
2009/1/5 sarah glynn <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> Egypt is the second biggest recipient of US aid in the region....
>
>>
>> Am 05.01.2009 um 18:25 schrieb Dr Hillary Shaw:
>>
>> > Can anyone tell us what is / should be the role of Egypt in the
>> > current crisis, and the Israeli blockade situation that preceded
>> > it. Egypt has a border, and a border crossing., into Gaza (Rafah
>> > crossing), and is surely in a geographical, if not economic,
>> > position, to send as much food etc into Gaza as is needed by the 1.5
>> > million people there. If economics is a problem, couldn't the oil-
>> > rich Arab states such as Saudi, Kuwait etc help Egypt out here?
>> >
>> > Of course there's also a political problem - how would Israel see
>> > these donations across Rafah from Egypt - would Egypt in fact be
>> > propping up Hamas, from the Israeli viewpoint? Would Israel in fact
>> > object, if it vcould be guaranteed that only food and other
>> > humanitarian aid, and not arms, was going in. Maybe idealistic, but
>> > maybe international observers at Rafah would be of use? Israel has
>> > shown it can beat Egypt militarily, but could scarcely use it as a
>> > war act if food and medicines alone were going in, and what would be
>> > the role of the USA here?
>> >
>> > I am of course by no means excusing any act of Israel here, but
>> > couldn't Egypt be encouraged to ameliorate the suffering of Gaza
>> > that lthen seems to have contributed to the rocketing of Sderot that
>> > in turn produced the current Israeli invasion. Or am I being just
>> > far too idealistic here? Maybe this would be seen as Egypt
>> > encouraging Israeli aggression (the blockade)? What do the rest of
>> > us crit-geoggers think?
>> >
>> > Hillary Shaw, Shropshire
>>
>> it seems to be quite simple: Hamas has no interest in humanitarian aid
>> for palestinian people, neither by Israel, nor by Egypt. That's why
>> they bombed the convoys with food/medical stuff from Israel to Gaza
>> before the war, that's why they bombed their own people resp. the
>> border crossings when Palestinians tried to adopt the help. That's why
>> nobody shows up there anymore.
>> For some antizionist freaks here that is to easy to see. Would mean a
>> change of perspectives, what nobody really likes. Especially when you
>> need your enemy.
>> By the way: the term »genocidal Israeli practises« (former mails) is
>> to me an inexcusable derailment in judging the situation, esp. for
>> left folks.
>>
>> thomas
>
>
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