[WCUSP] No peace for Israel without justice for Palestinians (Houston Chronicle)

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

>From the Houston Chronicle 
_http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4048204.html_ 
(http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4048204.html)  
No peace for Israel without  justice for the Palestinians
Jewish state must come to  terms with demographics
By SAREE  MAKDISI 
July 15, 2006 
The civilian infrastructure —  notably Beirut International Airport — was 
the first target of the attack that  Israel unleashed on Lebanon in response to 
the capture of two Israeli soldiers  this week.  
This mimicks Israel's earlier  assaults on the essentially defenseless 
population of the Gaza Strip. Israeli  missiles destroyed Gaza's only power plant, 
depriving half the population of  electricity for the hot summer months (no 
fans, no fridges, no light after  sunset). Israeli interdictions severely 
disrupted supplies of food, fuel,  medicines and water. Midnight air raids, artillery 
bombardments, and sleep  deprivation are taking a psychological toll, 
particularly on young children.  
Israel is, in short, now punishing  more than a million men, women and 
children in Gaza for a Palestinian guerrilla  attack on an Israeli army post (an 
obviously military target), and the entire  population of Lebanon for a Hezbollah 
attack on Israeli troops on its northern  border.  
As Israel lashes out  indiscriminately, mocking international law, U.S. 
government officials and  prominent pundits have expressed sympathy — not for the 
victims of these  attacks, but for their perpetrators. Moreover, much of the 
arsenal that Israel  uses against Lebanese and Palestinians is American, 
including the armored  bulldozers it uses to crush homes, the missiles recklessly 
fired into crowded  neighborhoods and the gunships that launch them.  
Such support tarnishes U.S.  standing in a strategically vital region of the 
world. More and more Americans  realize that we pay a price for Israel's 
abuses — and receive nothing in return.  
What we most urgently need to know  is that the tragedy now unfolding in Gaza 
is not merely one more episode in a  supposed "cycle of violence" (which 
implies proportionality), let alone a  genuine military contest (for only one side 
has an army).  
But if the current Israeli attacks  are utterly disproportionate to their 
alleged provocations, that is because far  more is at stake than Palestinian 
pinpricks. What is happening in Gaza is an  expression of Israel's political 
vision.  
Israeli politicians speak openly  of that vision (indeed, the current Israeli 
government won recent elections with  a pledge to fulfill it): the 
consolidation of a state with a Jewish majority in  a land in which barely half the 
population is actually Jewish.  
There is no way to implement such  a program without violence. That was the 
case in 1948, when half of Palestine's  non-Jewish population was driven into 
flight — never to be allowed to return —  in order for a Jewish state to be 
created on what had been Palestinians' land.  And it is the case today, as 
Israel seeks to forcibly isolate the land's  remaining non-Jewish population into 
barren islands cut off from each other and  the rest of the world.  
Gaza is only one of these  islands. The others are in the West Bank which, 
with Gaza and east Jerusalem,  are what remained of Palestine after it was 
dismembered in 1948 — only to be  captured by Israel in 1967.  
Jerusalem is already off  limits to most Palestinians. Israel has broken the 
West Bank into three separate  cantons. A grid of roadblocks further fragments 
each canton internally. Israel's  separation barrier only adds to the 
fragmentation, as do a road network barred  to Palestinians — and a sprawling array 
of illegal Jewish settlements — whose  annexation to Israel, while bypassing 
areas of indigenous, non-Jewish  population, is Israel's objective.  
Israel claims to hold the  Palestinian "government" accountable for the raid 
on its Gaza outpost. But this  archipelago of besieged territories does not — 
and it will never — amount to a  "state." It is designed to be a collection of 
open-air holding cells for the  land's non-Jewish population: spaces to 
detain them, isolate them from  health-care, educational and infrastructural 
services, deny them access to land,  resources and markets, until they either die or 
simply give up and go away.  Gaza's suffocation over the past year 
illustrates this perfectly.  
Each departing Palestinian will be  triumphantly checked off the tally by 
Israeli demographers like Arnon Sofer who,  anxiously monitoring what they 
unabashedly call the "demographic threat" to  their country, obsessively calculate 
ratios of Jews to non-Jews.  
Lacking an army, Palestinians do  not pose a material challenge to Israel. 
They pose an ideological challenge.  Raids like the one on the Gaza outpost 
remind Israelis that the Palestinians  will not go away; this is why Israel cannot 
tolerate them.  
Israel's announcement that  it now intends to create by force a depopulated 
"security zone" in northern Gaza  is eerily reminiscent of its futile attempt 
to enforce such a zone in southern  Lebanon. Israel's northern border fell 
silent — not when it had finally used  enough violence against Lebanon — but when 
it decided to end its illegal  military occupation of Lebanese territory. 
That lesson has apparently been  forgotten already, as Israel again holds an 
entire country hostage.  
The same principle applies to  Gaza. Israel's use of overwhelming force 
against civilian targets shows that it  still fails to understand that occupation 
begets resistance — and that peace for  Israelis is inseparable from justice 
for Palestinians.  
These are lessons that Americans  should learn as well. 
Makdisi, a nephew of the  late pro-Palestinian activist and writer Edward 
Said, is a professor of English  and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is a 
frequent commentator on the Middle  East. 
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